I think the idea of 'work' is not in a technical sense but in a business and social sense: does it see success at a large scale? As things get larger, they get

I think the idea of 'work' is not in a technical sense but in a business and social sense: does it see success at a large scale? As things get larger, they get harder to judge, so asking that about Linux and all airplanes and open source ISAs is kind of irrelevantly difficult, whereas it's pretty easy to talk about Matrix 'not working': I don't use it, my school doesn't use it, etc. It hasn't seen widespread adoption and success. To restate the OP with this definition, decentralized applications that do 'work' (see widespread success) are all 'owned' by some unknowably large corporation (Google for email, GitHub for Git, etc) in a way that emulates centralized applications (the restriction of traditional decentralized freedoms talked about in the article). Out of this, the post makes the point that if we see decentralized systems as 'good', then we have to face this as a failure of the 'free market' and try to think of or move to something better.