Part of my confusion is also the social/community aspect, especially with Haskell hackers' frequent and negative attitude toward the enterprise, like Stephen Diehl who has become a sort of spokesperson for the "web3 is a farce (and worse)" narrative. It seems like such a stark juxtaposition, especially with SPJ and Lennart Augustsson, two research giants of the community, taking part in it in a serious capacity.

(To be abundantly clear and uncontroversial, as it pertains to this comment, I'm not interested in discussing "is web3/metaverse {good,bad}", but rather in discussing the purely functional programming community-of-community's interests or anti-interests in it.)