And they seem to be doing poorly on the trust element. My lack of trust in the controlling entities is why I left the space.

Bitcoin is more centralized ( via the mining cartel) than the existing banking system. The wealth gap is greater in crypto than the analog world too.

That's a great point. And it's definitely a tricky term to navigate because "blockchain" means so many different things to different people. (e.g. tokenization, governance, finance).

I'd say you identified the key aspect though, which I agree is not explicitly answered in this blog. "Who runs this" is a critical question and I think it will vary depending on the end application. I'm going to guess there will be settings where a permissioned deployment may be appropriate (think enterprise settings). There will be settings where a permissionless deployment will make more sense (think globally censorship-resistant Wikipedia). It all boils down to who wants to control it and how to convey trust. And for each of those, you probably have different access control policies too.