I wish I had realized before I clicked that this was not, as the title suggests, thoughtful industry analysis. Rather, it's an investment pitch from a startup to help them raise capital.

I would suggest a barometer for whether a new technology does, in fact "matter": how much of the writing about it is by VCs and startups looking to hype their own investments.

In the case of "the Metaverse", that ratio seems to be surprisingly close to 1.0.

(Another barometer of significance is, "Does it have a definition which is sufficiently concrete to say what it isn't?," which the 'metaverse' seems often to conspicuously lack as well.)