[debt]

Just quickly from a technical perspective: web3 is like a useful wrapper around json-rpc which etherereum nodes use as a comms protocol.

You can just use whatever off the shell cli thing that supports json-rpc and talk directly to the mainnet.

Web3 is more of a concept that involves wrapping those complicated and cumbersome raw json-rpc calls(deploy a contract, compile a contract etc) into simple libraries. There’s literally a bazillion web3 libraries in many different programming languages. It simplifies talking to the ethereum mainnet.

I think they tackled it a little too high level in their post; missing the fact it’s really just a costly distributed state store you interact with via json-rpc with a shitty wrapper everyone basically calls web3.