I think of Gemini less like a competitor to the web but more as ham radio.
Radio amateurs can communicate through the internet with their phones and it would be faster, simpler and easier. But radio gives them both the nostalgia feeling and a niche community to belong.
I don't use Pico-8, and I find its limitations frustrating; I am never going to make a game in Pico-8. But I do use stuff like Jummbox when I compose music, for basically the same exact reasons other devs use Pico-8 for games, and I love Jummbox's limitations for music composition.
Limitations are a way of fostering community (ham radio enthusiasts all kind of get to know local operators, Jummbox makes sharing song sources in a digestible way super-easy). Limitations also allow you to not care about complications that would be barriers to building things -- I don't want to set up a VST before I start writing music.
So my feeling on Gemini has shifted from being a curmudgeon about honestly kind of really nitpicky, shallow stuff like the ability to mark-up inline language transitions -- into realizing that when you step away from thinking of the project as some kind of attack on the web then yeah, it actually makes a ton of sense to build a small community around a very limited format that forces everyone in that community to be standardized in how they share with each other, keeps the community a little bit niche so that the people in it are a bit more friendly and personable, and forces its participants to focus pretty much only on what they're writing and nothing else.
Radio amateurs can communicate through the internet with their phones and it would be faster, simpler and easier. But radio gives them both the nostalgia feeling and a niche community to belong.
Gemini is kinda like that.