I would argue that centralization is inherent in most humans instincts. To put it another way, many people like having a leader.

In fact people like leaders so much that exposed to a capricious and cruel world they'll invent imaginary and often cruel ones just to give the world a sense of order. Think the old testament God or lizard people conspiracy theories.

Given we're going to huge groups of people running around following leaders I think our best effort is spent trying to make the selection of those leaders pick non-evil people who run vaguely meritocratic and fair systems. Rather than trying to engineer ideal de-centralized systems _which will also have to be robust against the mob following their evil leaders.

Obviously this is a false dichotomy and we can do both, but please don't give up on good leadership, people need it and there's plenty of examples of it exiting.

This causes such a problem with governance though: Instead of voting for (or contributing to) ideas/policies directly, you have to translate your preference into a selection/ranking of the people who sound like they might support the ideas that you would like to see in your democracy. Sounds like a pretty crappy codec for that kind of signal tbh.

I would go even further in your argument and say that the escape-hatches are a requirement to keep the centralized system in check. This is a bit like the free market argument in the sense that it creates competition.