Federation is exactly the criticism against all the web 2.0 platforms (Facebook etc.) when they first came out nearly 20 years ago, and nobody heeded the warning and everyone jumped in and signed up. The only truly federated communication platforms left are email and shared-hosting blogs.
The reason blogs won't be popular again is because you have to pay a web hosting fee and learn a little bit, and those are two huge barriers to entry.
Email is still viable because businesses use it and there's enough network effect to keep it going, but I interact with teenagers due to some high school volunteering I do and trying to get a teenager to use email is futile. They won't respond to a message, and the most common reason they offer is, "oh, my phone doesn't tell me when I get an email message."
The vast majority of people who use social media don't care about any of the issues discussed in the article, and need the service to be really, really simple to sign up for. A federated system by definition requires you to make a choice, and a choice is a barrier to entry, so a federated system can never be as simple as a walled garden. Then you have to remember that their only reason for going on these platforms is because someone they want the approval of (or to sleep with) is already on there. If your business plan doesn't include a method of attracting and keeping these socially attractive individuals, it'll fail. The number of people willing to sign up for a social media platform because it has a bunch of privacy nerds hanging out on it is vanishingly small.
Since when was doing things that were previously thought impossible so ripe for criticism.
Since the reporters gave up on journalistic integrity, stopped trying to be unbiased, and decided to take sides in the culture war. The one where "they've" decided that Elon Musk is "da enemy" and so anything related to him must be evil.
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android