There was an article from 2019 [0] that someone on HN linked recently about how "web of trust is dead", but it seems to concern scalability problems with the keyserver, which resulted in DoS attacks, which made them disable the feature by default. The concept should presumably still be good, assuming the issues specific to the GPG keyserver can be avoided.

[0] https://inversegravity.net/2019/web-of-trust-dead/