im pretty bearish on ENS long-term

imo any sufficiently popular cryptosocial product will generate native demand for their own namespace, and be able to charge rent for identities. it'll be more profitable than co-opting ENS

the only truly canonical, interoperable identity is an ethereum address

Sure, but as more web3 social apps come online why wouldn’t namespace rent get commoditized to 0 (as it’s just a barrier to onboarding). I imagine apps will find more lucrative and differentiated ways to monetize that leverage new incentive models with tokenization, etc.

Crypto. Prev. Product at ConsenSys, Intuit

This is my assumption as well. In a mature market the marginal cost/value of a new username falls to 0