I've made this observation too.

We spend a lot of time trying to achieve consensus with our neighbor parasites about the status of a transaction (slice the pie n ways, perhaps your database says that m of those n got paid, but mine says that m-1 got paid...), but if it were on a public blockchain there would be nothing to dispute.

But the biggest actors in crypto are the exchanges, literally the middlemen between buyers and sellers. The volume of trade with crypto as a medium of exchange is dwarfed by the amounts changing hands via the exchanges.

You may need an exchange once to acquire crypto (and even then, not really, you could buy crypto from an individual, or mine it, or just take a payment in crypto...) but once you're "in the system" so to speak, you can pay and receive crypto without ever having to deal with exchanges anymore.

> No middleman

except for a handful of giant server farms in china

Miners don't have middlemen powers. They can't censor your transactions like a true middleman could. Even if 9 out of 10 miners colluded to censor you, all you need is 1 out of the 10 to be honest, and your transactions would still go through.