Similarly bitcoin is decentralized in that “anyone can fork it” but reality is without backing from major players, that will never gain any traction at all.
So no, functionally it is nothing approaching decentralized.
At the crucial point they did however convince the miners to support a Segwit + blocksize increase, which pulled away the support.
Of course, it's obvious that it was just a bait-and-switch and the blocksize increase is nowhere to be seen, and will probably never happen.
Ultimately, miners would only support a hard fork if a super majority went along with it and with the major forums being censored that was going to be impossible.
Without the censorship there would have been a super majority supporting the hard work given the sentiment on the forums at that time.
They didn't just control the repo, but they somehow managed to convince the miners to support them. Exchanges and users simply defaulted to "the longest chain is Bitcoin", ensuring their victory. So they weren't alone.
But Bitcoin's truly decentralized nature allows for forks, where if you disagree with the development direction you can always go your own way. So the spirit of Bitcoin lives on in other projects (both via forks and via projects with no shared history with Bitcoin).
> You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.
Yes, it was (and is) still a major failure of the project's goals.