This is a pretty shallow dismissal. The ideas argued against here haven't been popular in the crypto world since ~2018. Nobody thinks you need a blockchain to

This is a pretty shallow dismissal. The ideas argued against here haven't been popular in the crypto world since ~2018. Nobody thinks you need a blockchain to sign into a website. When people talk about web3 based decentralized identity, they are usually talking about an identity that is coupled to an on-chain asset (NFT, position in a pool, etc). That does "require" blockchains for the reasons explained in the first few paragraphs of this article. I put "require" in quotes because you could definitely build this stuff without a blockchain. But nothing like that will ever become widely adopted. It's not about "requiring" a blockchain in the sense of a necessary condition. It's about blockchains enabling things in a way that they are otherwise unlikely to be enabled.