I wouldn’t put it in those terms, no. I think platforms added value, in the sense that they provided a means to connect with other people on a common substrate, and engage in a form of communication that was simply not possible before.

It’s also true that the rise of social media platforms happened at a time, where computing resources and bandwidth on the internet was not really in a place where it was economically viable to do so in a full distributed way.

But like with all periods of creative destruction in the market, there is a period where the old paradigm becomes stuck in how people think about the world, and when those incumbents start doing everything they can to resist the coming change (through anti-competitive business practices, regulatory capture, etc). Eventually the dam breaks and change comes all at once.