The idea (or hope) is that apps based on semantic standards would kick off a virtuous cycle where publishers of information keep investing in both generating metadata and evolving the standards themselves. As many have mentioned in the thread, thats not a trivial step.
People sort of try. A concrete example are the Activitypub/Fediverse standards which dared to use json-ld. To my knowledge so far the social media experience of mastodon and friends is not qualitatively different from the old web stuff.
I think you misunderstand me, it's not that I don't understand the idea in and of itself, I don't understand the logic of believing that such a thing is integral to the definition of success of protocols.
People sort of try. A concrete example are the Activitypub/Fediverse standards which dared to use json-ld. To my knowledge so far the social media experience of mastodon and friends is not qualitatively different from the old web stuff.