Simple tools are not popular

Simple things, especially in tech, are not popular. Some may be used silently behind the scene, but they are rarely visible or promoted. The reason is simple. It's impossible to create a business around them. You can't create an industry around a plain text file. There are no conferences, books, or presentations about primitive utilities. Those tools are simple, and they work. Nothing exciting. Hard to extract money from it.

Complexity is a feature for the people who profit from it. Companies and developers can talk, explain, write about it, and build the whole ecosystem around it. If you create some simple format for sharing, syndicating content, or connection, it may attract a few enthusiasts, and some articles and comments pop up. Most likely, you will also get feature requests.

But if you have a budget and create some complex nonsense like AT Protocol, you get into the news. People start building tools, libraries, and the entire ecosystem around that thing. Talks, videos, and long articles about implementation and its superiority. For those people, probably even such a circus as ActivityPub feels too simple. Excited groups want to implement it sooner than it's even ready. Often just because you can list it as a feature for your paid service.

Those complex tools are hard to manage and control by a single human. They typically require some company or authority. The perfect examples are web browsers and practically any new technology standard. If something is too complex and hard to understand, that's the business opportunity and the power structure.

Then shiny apps and services are created around complex protocols. Nobody understands how they work, and they definitely can't be run, managed, and controlled by a random peasant. So people voluntarily jump into walled gardens and pay the rent.