Gemini claims to “Takes user privacy very seriously” and yet it leaks the client and server IP addresses to each other and to network observers by not using any form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_network.

It claims to “Strives for maximum power to weight ratio” and yet does not support caching.

It does not support content-addressed sites in any form: to host a single-page static site the user has to pay for a VPS or buy some SBC, pay for a domain and configure DNS. The “lightweight” aspect is the protocol itself, not the deployment effort.

The protocol is “non-extensible by design” but obviously cannot prevent users from adding higher-level markups in some clients and start adding complexity, exactly what happened for the web.