I don't think Forbes does alarmist articles for the sake of alarmism. Here's how I am reading this. It's an article geared towards the audience of Forbes, who

I don't think Forbes does alarmist articles for the sake of alarmism. Here's how I am reading this. It's an article geared towards the audience of Forbes, who are affluent highly educated, business-minded consumers of and investors in digital products. Which is a different audience from those frequenting Hackernews. At it's core, the article paints an easy to grok good-vs-evil narrative by corralling billion-dollar corporations one side, and small grass-roots projects on the other side, the underdog. Then it ends with a cliffhanger "will the underdog win from the alpha dog?" leaving how the story might end open to the reader. That unwritten conclusion should be clear to the reader: The decentralized web might create an investment opportunity. Incumbents are struggling with a perception problem, and under that vague umbrella of "dencentralized web" you'll find these new technologies that people might trust. The article doesn't address the real issue: the lack of proper regulation. It just mentions that in the last paragraph, almost as a side note. Which basically acknowledges that the author(s) do have an understanding, but are simply choosing not to focus on that because it doesn't fit the narrative. Lambasting TBL's initial vision of the Web as "pollyannic" and then not even mentioning him as an important instigator of the decentralized Web - linked data, Semantic Web, Inrupt/Solid,... - is just another clue that the authors are just interested in their colored narrative of the history.