"Five people doing ritual work in a living room might actually be more stable than five thousand sitting in pews because there's no single point of failure."

This is the part that landed for me — I came into this through psychology, not religion, and the parallel to distributed networks vs. fragile hierarchies feels right in my bones.

When Shakyamuni Buddha died, he reportedly told his followers to be lamps unto themselves — appo dippo bhava. No guru, no hierarchy, no cathedral. Just direct investigation of the nature of suffering and its cessation. What you are watching with this deinstitutionalization is, in some sense, the Western spiritual tradition finally catching up to what the Buddha pointed to 2,500 years ago and what Zen masters have been repeating ever since: the authority is in your own direct experience, not in the structure built around it.

Your point about five people in a living room being more stable than five thousand in pews because there is no single point of failure maps precisely onto the Buddhist concept of sangha — spiritual community — as one of the three jewels. But the sangha the Buddha described was not a hierarchical organization. It was a decentralized network of practitioners supporting each other's direct investigation. Fragile in one sense, resilient in another. Each node can function independently.

The risk you identified — new age fluff filling the vacuum — is real, and it parallels something the Thai forest tradition warned about: when the formal structures dissolve, people tend to gravitate toward whatever is easiest rather than what is most skillful. The crystal Instagram crowd is, in Buddhist terms, mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. But that confusion is also part of the process. The confusion has to burn through before genuine practice can establish itself in the new, decentralized form.

The Tower card in this context is not about destruction. It is about the collapse of a centralized authority that had become a prison for direct spiritual experience. What gets built afterward — if we are wise — will be distributed, non-hierarchical, and resistant to co-optation. Not because it is ideologically pure, but because it is structurally impossible to control from any single point.

I share your cautious hope. Thirty years on a cushion has taught me that the Dharma outlives every container it is placed in. The current one just happened to be made of stone.