They never said that Talk was aimed at moving that goal further along, however. They're trying to use it instead to allow better curation tools to make comments manageable.
It seems that their goal is to help sites move away from 3rd-party comment management services such as Facebook and Disqus. Based on this discussion, I think federated (not site-owned) comments are the way to go long-term. Maybe Talk can eventually be adapted to help with decentralized comment moderation.
The thing about federated comment feeds is that these news outlets will not be incentivized to embed them directly to their website, as they lose control of the content. This problem will damage the exposure that a federated system would receive.
Better than having news outlets embed them, is having browsers support mixing federated comments with the original content. How about it, Mozilla, Brave, and Chromium? Afraid to bite the hand that feeds you?
The decentralized web does nothing to advance universal health care, so why is it a good thing?