You’re missing the point. The point is that the chain can fork at anytime. If the community doesn’t like the difficulty bomb, they fork it. Ethereum classic is an example of that happening.

It so happens that the consensus of the majority decided to stick with Ethereum rather than classic. But still no single person or entity gets to decide.

Forks can not be functional for any practical purpose. Because every release is time limited, you have to stick to the official release at every time, or else fork completely.

The Ethereum foundation kept a huge stash from the pre-mine, so you'd have a hostile actor with a large position on your forked chain, enough to crash the price of any nascent chain. This combination is a governance model rooted in game theory.

Ethereum Classic shows pretty well how this works in practice. There was controversy around the DAO, yet no fork could be kept functional. It is a Grayscale project which they will keep around as long as people are willing to speculate on it. Nobody pretends it has any real use.

>>The Ethereum foundation kept a huge stash from the pre-mine, so you'd have a hostile actor with a large position on your forked chain, enough to crash the price of any nascent chain.

This is completely false. The Ethereum Foundation has less than 0.5M ETH, or less than 1% of the total supply.