What I said is that the design of git was driven by the requirements of async workflow (“easing the pain”, in your words) more than decentralization as a philosophical objective. I think we saying the same thing with different words.
I still wonder if Larry McVoy feels sore that git basically destroyed BitKeeper and became what it did. “It could have been me” and all that...
Linus didn't want to achieve a change in workflow of kernel development, he just made a tool to make which would ease the pain, Linux development was decentralized since forever.