Does taking advantage of the benefits of web3 require users to become operators? Much of the transition off of small self-maintained websites occurred because new users were not interested in being operators, and existing operators were more interested in putting content out than in taking on the perpetual responsibility of being involved in the cat and mouse game against every malicious user on the planet that being an operator entails.

I don't think web3 is dead in the water... I wouldn't even discuss it if I thought it was. But the challenges of creating a new paradigm that displaces the old one aren't technological alone... They're how to solve real problems real people have. What I have seen of the blockchain based solutions suggests to me that they aren't doing much to simplify using the blockchain itself, and I don't think we're going to boil the ocean of converting most web users to even neophyte cryptographers to get them on board with the trust model necessary for the blockchain to help with web3.