but what if the alternatives are fundamentally worse? Turns out centralization has a lot of advantages.

I think it's an error to demand the alternatives be as good-- that might not even always be possible. But even if they're less good they're usually still better than anything we could have imagined decades ago-- they're good enough to use.

And that should be enough because we shouldn't consider handing control of ourselves to third parties to be an acceptable choice at all.