One thing he said during that conversation when it became clear he only understood it well enough to put big lego blocks together was "oh it's hard to talk to you web2 guys". Just 0_0 lol what.
That's about my take of what web3 has meant to me ever since. The evm ethereum virtual machine is interesting in it's own right as well as some adjacent things. I don't really want to make any claim as to if any of that stuff is 'going anywhere'. He couldn't elucidate any of that to me in person, just an ol web2 guy, sadly.
"Ethereum" was going to be a suite of tools of which what we call Ethereum today was only one. There was supposed to be a swarm protocol to enable distributed transfer of files, a message transport protocol, a human readable naming system (ENS does exist but it is not quite what was defined early on) and all coming together in Mist browser.
So then we got IPFS, which replaced Swarm, and the EF decided to focus on the EVM and let the community develop other compoenets that could become web3. Ok, cool, why reinvent the wheel. They ditched Mist and stopped maintaining a reference implementation, again, letting the community build. Then Metamask came out, and the rest is history: "web3" is now just websites that pitch you NFTs.
Today, Ethereum is cool; it's a place to launch unregistered securities that cannot be stopped, to trade assets in a decentralized manner. It gives everyone censorship resistance for finance. Some cool things have been built in the process, liquidity pools are revolutionary. But web3? Where is it? I can't even see it being over the horizon no matter how hard I squint. It's a bunch of webdevs pitching tokens to get rich.