It shifts and distributes the burden of trust. There are mountains of scenarios where we shift from "we rely on trusting this one person / entity" to "we rely on trusting at least one of these N people / entities", and that is a huge win every time.

> this just shifts the burden of who to trust to the verifiers

Agreed. A colleague once said that trust is like a balloon; if you reduce trust in one area, you tend to expand trust in another area.

I think the typical response to your statement from a user is that it’s easier to trust a set of verifiers than it is to trust a vendor. The act of a verifier blessing an artifact makes that artifact more trustworthy.

Personally I’m skeptical of these claims, but that’s the underlying assumption of the certification process

Presumably there is benefit in reducing trust in a party with mixed or unknown incentives to increase trust in a party whose incentives align with your own. For a critical piece of software I could imagine a schema where a user pays one or more independent verifiers to validate the software. That would allow the user to control the incentives of the entities telling them the software is safe.

No, because now you don’t have to trust any one entity completely. You just have to trust that at least one of the verifiers is uncompromised.