Anyone have counter examples to this? Companies that seemingly won the market without clearly defining a narrow wedge?

The article you linked listed a few companies which won markets without a wedge. Their list was Zoom, Slack, Workday, Notion, Datadog, Spotify, and Peloton; on first glance, this list seems to make sense.

This is the kind of long-term investment needed to push metaverse forward. I think it basically requires a founder-CEO to accomplish, as public markets apply way too much short term focus to any other executive.

Seems like FB or TWTR or NTFLX or TSLA are the only big players able to accomplish risks like this at this point...

FB is spending 50 billion on stock buybacks. Thats the biggest sign they have no clue what to do with the cash they have. From such people's imagination the metaverse is produced.

My theory is the whole metaverse charade is just a nice story for investors in hopes to figure things out later when this inevitably doesn’t pan out. Kind of like g+

They could build a Bart extension from union city to East Palo Alto. There’s already a track.