It has learned from those times, as much as you can even talk about "W3C" as an entity doing coherent things. Individual working groups have can have very little overlap with other groups, and have a lot of freedom in how they work. Which means they can putter about in ivory towers, or do effective work, as they wish.
I agree that sounds good, but can you point to something that they have actually done lately?
The ActivityPub process is a good example - yes, it got there, but much of the difficulties around the standardisation process seem related to the W3C process, not standardisation itself.
I was involved around the edges of the Atom standardisation process[1]. There's a reason that went through the IEFT and not the W3C[2].
