The article doesn't point out anything that hasn't been tried. You're telling me that bookmark links is going to solve it?!
Maybe we can pay money for discovery instead of paying with our eyeballs, but do people even want the small web enough for it to work? I do, but I highly doubt enough other people do. And even if a high enough threshhold of people want it to work, what's going to stop the SEO/gaming arms race that happened before?
To me, it looks like the same problems of social media and eventual enshittification. I think despite the best intentions we had, this is the reality of the web (or maybe the reality of humans, or maybe the reality of capitalism).
Doing list of bookmarks is our way to organize ourselves. Always has been, always will be. Except now we know why we have to do it, compared to times before where monetization was an attractive light that we didn't know was a trap.
SEO won't work because we don't care about SEO. We care about personal touch, about lightweightness, about sustainability; none of those are provided by ad-based business because none of those are provided by capitalism, by construction. It's not about being the biggest, it's about being ours.