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Banks in the Netherlands used to have their own system for 30 years. It was free. It worked.

But it was too much work and didn't make the banks money so now we are also left to the American Visa parasite.

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Yeah. But this is the US. This is all we’ve got. Having the central bank do it would be communism, and that’s bad. I learned about it from Saturday morning cartoons.
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Ironically it's the central bank (and associated regulations) that cause these intermediaries to exist to begin with.

A protocol to support decentralized payments is a hobby project for an individual. You give each institution an identifier (e.g. their domain name) and each institution gives each customer an account number. If you're account 123 at Chase then you sign in as #123@chase.com, tell Chase you want to send $5 to #456@bankofamerica.com, they send the money and Bank of America tells their customer they have a new deposit. If you want to collect money from someone, you tell your bank to send their bank a payment request and they can either approve it manually (e.g. so you can deliver the goods for a one-time purchase) or configure some rules for which accounts get approved automatically up to some threshold amount (e.g. for recurring payments). Also no reason for banks in different countries not to all support the same protocol.

That doesn't require a central bank or any centralized third party payments intermediary. All it requires is for banks to know how to send money to other banks, which they obviously already do and the specific implementation of that isn't even relevant to the customer-facing payments protocol. So how does this not exist? It can't be that no one wants it, so it's got to be that someone (e.g. Visa/MasterCard) doesn't want it.

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The banks all got together and created Zelle, so it exists. No Visa/Mastercard conspiracy needed.
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Zelle is an app rather than a protocol, which is why e.g. PoS terminals and web checkouts don't support it.
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Zelle, from my understanding, is a “protocol” – many banks support it in their own apps. (Scare quotes because I’m not entirely sure it’s a proper well-defined protocol.)

And there’s nothing preventing PoS from supporting individual wallet apps – see e.g. WeChat Pay / Alipay in China. (Alipay+ is also a “protocol”, i.e. other banks and wallets support it.)

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