Are you sure?
This statement reads to me to be heavily hindsight biased.
CERN wasn't exactly a place filled with idiots, yet the article even says that Tim Berners-Lee's boss thought the concept was a little eccentric and only gave in because Tim Berners-Lee fought for it.
Unless you're saying the concept is simple? In which case yes, most brilliant ideas that are hard to have are made by elegantly combining things to make a "simple" result.
The really annoying thing about those ideas is you sit there and kick yourself thinking, "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that"
There's a very different possible future where he instead went private and sold it, and I honestly have no idea how to work out how successful the web would have been in that world.
A good chunk of the web's impact is it was how easy it was to adopt, so I doubt we would have seen as much success as we do see now, as one of the bedrocks of our current ecosystem.
We might even have seen a similar situation to unix and linux, where a theoretical proprietary web that was released eventually was rewritten in an open-source format, but with lots of fragmentation of the ecosystem.
Surely hypertext and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu were well known to most people in the field by the time Berners-Lee did his work?
If Ted Nelson hadn't been so obsessed with making it pay we might have had the web sooner. Whether that would be a good thing or not is debatable though as the Internet was not available when he started.
Hypertext systems precede the web, I was using hypertext documents on CompuServe in the late 80s. It's hard to disagree given what was available at the time that putting the hypertext documents on another kind of network was a natural progression.