So, after too many hours of digging through specs and primers and whatnot, here's a brief summary of why Linked Data and RDF and all are interesting:
It allows to link "databases" (datasets) across different sites, without needing centralized coordination. It's like federation for datasets, and there is a whole ecosystem of tools for merging and relating between such datasets.
It was essentially an attempt to extend the 'open web' to machine-readable data, not just human-readable webpages.
There's a lot of technical details, and a lot of issues that hampered its adoption, and a lot of specialized tools, but like, once you ignore all the details, that's the pitch and that's what it does (and the design *does* broadly seem to make sense).
