It's effectively the automation of slow, human intermediaries in the financial network that allows you to create a programmable money that runs 24/7 and is open and permissionless to boot.
And with this programmable network, we can see an explosion of innovation, because nobody needs to wait around for a person to approve anything you want to try.
"Spot foreign exchange transactions usually settle two business days after the execution date"
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/settlementdate.asp#:~:t....
Real-time gross settlement is the instant way of transferring money between banks. Try and send $100K to someone and getting it done same day. Most people don't have access to that system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_gross_settlement
If they could impose all the regulation they want on permissionless, trustless p2p decentralized networks, those would be slow and massively expensive, too.
Fortunately, they haven't the power. They can attack the edges (and ultimately every centralized stablecoin can be attacked) but they can't stop, say, uniswap.