Centralization of people into cities led to many, many, many historical advancements in arts and sciences.

Decentralization of cities - competition - sometimes helps even more, but the societies that never centralized never got as far. (And that decentralization can backfire sometimes too, e.g. military competition instead of economic.)

Societies that never centralized didn't get far mainly because they were conquered by the societies that did. But I don't think it's reasonable to consider that an advantage of centralization - it's more that it turns out to be such a huge disadvantage, it spills over to your neighbors even if they don't like it.

Decentralization of people and housing == suburban sprawl, car dependency, tens of thousands of fatal collisions, the climate crisis, etc. Decentralization shifts the difficulty into communication/coordination, which is sometimes more tractable but also sometimes not.

Centralization of people is not "good" for the environment either, People are polluters, high levels of people in an area causes pollution as well

This is my problem with the studies on suburban sprawl is they do not factor in all of the things, they are generally only looking at one thing namely car and home pollution

Then you have Higher Crime, and a whole host of other matters that come with Dense Urban Centers that you do not get when people spread out.

On Balance I will take suburban sprawl over Urban Density every day, and twice on Sunday

What specific forms of pollution besides transportation and home energy use do you think are important here? Humans are mainly polluters by virtue of our homes and cars, which a lot more intense in decentralized environments.

Suburbanites are at very high risk of life-altering consequences from the actions of other humans. Many of those actions are crimes (DUI, distracted driving, reckless driving), but worse, some are not even crimes (incompetent driving, tired driving, intentional killing of annoying cyclists). That we feel so differently about these compared to more traditionally urban forms of crime is just cognitive bias with a helping of racism.

The environmental impact of the average NYC resident is among the lowest in the US.

And with respect to density, produce for NYC was grown within sight of Manhattan as late as 1960. The impact of the belt of suburbia from Richmond, VA to New Hampshire is far more harmful that the cities.

The greenest place for humans to live is in dense cities. https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1418581766047105025

Centralization is just a tool (if methods of organization are tools).

Sometimes, it's clearly the right choice (where are program settings settings? `~/.config`).

It's also VERY simple. If all you want is client/server version control, and you don't mind the constraints, SVN's UX and learning curve beats git's by a long shot.

Decentralization buys you flexibility, but entails tons of complexity.

your case to prove centralization is sometimes good is SVN over git

I can not envision any scenario in which I would choose SVN over git

If you don't need decentralized version control, why wouldn't you? Have you ever used SVN? It's much easier than git. :D