Interesting stuff. Fire your headline writer, though, because I think your conclusion is potentially more hopeful than the headline suggests.
I'm thinking of the bullet point about a "paid Mastodon instance." I think people (e.g. [1]) have been trying to imagine something like that into existence, and now a lot of groundwork has been laid. Now it's time to build on that, which isn't so much a technical as an institutional problem. As a recent piece on federated systems from Open Democracy also stated [2], what is needed now are people with "institutional expertise" to build up the organizational side of this. Some are suggesting that the Apache Foundation or the Free Software Foundation may provide a model [3].