Gopher is the opposite of new. Gemini is interesting for sure, but it's not an alternative to the web as they fully admit. It's an alternative to a subset of the web. Let's call it the document web. Blogs and articles and so on. But as entertaining as it is, it is a very very small subset.
Respectfully, you're failing to engage with the purpose of the project.
> it's not an alternative to the web
Right. You can't have a lightweight drop-in alternative to the web, pretty much by definition. Any platform capable of everything modern browsers are capable of, is by definition enormously complex.
> it is a very very small subset
That's not a flaw, it's a design goal. It isn't meant to be a half-baked portable GUI toolkit the way the modern web platform is, it's meant to be a simple and minimal format, stable and easy to implement. There are other formats somewhat like this in common usage, like man pages and, of course markdown.
That's the point. If you want the web, you need today's browsers. If you want a subset of the web, your "document web" for example, you can get away with something simpler.