Yes, the article is basically talking about turning the web into something it currently isn't. In a strange way, this was what the web was when it was very young; a bunch of inter-linked documents written in static HTML that rarely moved around.
But now we have something of a hodgepodge bazaar. For URLs to truly not move around and survive the creator and his/her circumstances, there needs to be a distributed repository. I don't know if Freenet will be that repository (the one time I tried it, it was glacially slow). Maybe Bittorrent's Sync project will pave the way to create a truly universal, persistent, content repository with permanent URI(L)s.
> I don't know if Freenet will be that repository (the one time I tried it, it was glacially slow).
Freenet is only slow because of all the indirection it needs to do to guarantee anonymity. You could get the same distributed-data-store semantics "in the clear" for a much lower cost, and then layer something like Tor on top of them if you wanted the anonymity back.
As you say, the early web came close to this ideal. What happened was almost entirely political and social, namely censorship, and copyright, and DMCA takedowns, etc (only occasionally would a "webmaster" die, or would a system fall into disrepair). Freenet/anonymity (and the early web had the appearance of anonymity), is one approach to prevent pointer-breakage by simply making the censorship impractical. Another would simply be to accept that the web should be an append-only distributed database like Bitcoin's blockchain or like a de-duplicating filesystem in which additions depend on prior content, making censorship all or nothing (and hopefully we wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater). Bittorrent is somewhere between - anonymity through numbers and a high-availability through independent mirroring (without interdependence between torrents, discouraging censorship).
But now we have something of a hodgepodge bazaar. For URLs to truly not move around and survive the creator and his/her circumstances, there needs to be a distributed repository. I don't know if Freenet will be that repository (the one time I tried it, it was glacially slow). Maybe Bittorrent's Sync project will pave the way to create a truly universal, persistent, content repository with permanent URI(L)s.