It takes for core developers years of great and conservative technical leadership to get to the point where I would trust them on the few points where a quick decision is needed. For example I'm glad that Luke came up with the idea of the segwit soft fork, but I will never forget his messing with Bitcoin Gentoo packages.

Technical consensus provides an important backup / tie-breaker when meta-consensus isn't clear.

This has happened multiple times in the past with Bitcoin, most recently with Bitcoin Cash vs. Bitcoin Core. The user-base is split, there is lots of propaganda on both sides. However the technical consensus yields a single chain (Bitcoin Core).

Actually there were 2 persistent bitcoin chains to emerge from that conflict, one led by Bitcoin Core’s consensus rules and one led by Bitcoin Cash’s consensus rules. Nothing technical prevented the fork. And to claim one is more “bitcoin” than the other is moot. In fact the argument of which bitcoin chain is what Satoshi would have wanted is still being argued about every single day...

True both are still around, but a user can simply choose the fork with the longest chain (most PoW).

This is important because all other metrics such as choosing based on message boards, market cap, etc. can be more easily gamed.

Not sure if this is entirely right but I think technical decentralization depends on its participants making conscious decisions to react to events, but that doesn't happen and somehow you need to assign higher weight (centralization) to certain participants (core developers) to correct a few things.

Don't "hard" changes require network consensus to be enacted?

As in if every one who uses bitcoin decided that changes suggested by leadership are wrong, and not in the best interest of the network, they choose not to update their client or they don't verify transactions containing the change?