I do think that if Redditors (like me) arrive in waves and continue to set the tone, we will see pressure on front-end developers to figure out a way to conflate identically named communities in the end-user UI. It would take federation in a slightly different direction than expected, but it provides resiliency in its own way. For instance if a large instance supplies 50% of the "tech" articles and defederates or collapses, users still get 50% of the experience with no additional effort. I'm sure there are knock-on effects I'm ignoring, though.