I think this article by Alyssa Rosenzweig is important to consider. I think it does make some assumptions about the purpose of federating, but it does make one very important point that I think everyone in this space is ignoring: the internet was already fundamentally federated from the beginning, and look how that turned out.
It’s for this reason that I believe a fediverse only survives due to a culture of keeping it alive, but I don’t know that that culture will survive long term in a free market. It might be that the internet is just like the rest of the world: an ebb and flow of democratic and totalitarian states, history being forgotten, lessons being relearned the hard way. That might just be how the internet works now.