People seemed to like it being stuck in the 1980s.

Touché. Getting stuck with an obsolete service/protocol for decades is a nightmare, even if it is just ye olde user inertia. If it is mandated by law or pushed by the government, it becomes nearly impossible to update.

In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.

That's the fate of all government-backed systems as well as all decentralised systems. The former can't evolve because of extreme bureaucracy and the latter can't evolve because of incompatibility trauma and fragmentation.

But in either case we do have the ability to make a new system every 10 years.