"...the current advantages and disadvantages of decentralization speak for themselves at this point."

Art has not imitated life to the extent living things are far more than minimally decentralized. In the crypto ecosystem, advantages of centralization are a reflection of the complexity of the system - which is rapidly advancing atm - and the simplicity of the current system favors high centralization, because that enables control of the use of the coin to maintain and increase it's utility, which encourages it's adoption.

IRL, nutrient flows are extraordinarily diverse, as are means of tapping them. The vast majority of living things are the most decentralized organisms that can exist: single cells. Macrobiological creatures, however, maintain their niche in the ecosystem by succeeding at most efficiently acquiring the resources they are evolved to capture, and dominate ecosystems in terms of biomass.

Cryptocurrencies aren't the initial beginning of life, long preceded by glass beads, gold, stone wheels, and beaver pelts, but the present explosion of forms and kinds of money in some ways resembles the Cambrian Explosion, in which living things suddenly produced an almost infinite diversity of designs (after billions of relatively gradual evolutionary changes), with one researcher (Stephen J. Gould, IIRC) positing that some species tried as many as 70k sexes, for example. That turned out to be an impractical mechanism for enabling evolution to adapt species to environments, and it turned out that two sexes proved optimal for that.

Crypto has a way to go before that myriad diversity of experiments demonstrates certain features, like body plans in living things by which we categorize them cladistically today, are optimal and necessary to almost all coins, like sexual reproduction is well established in living species today. Even sexual reproduction, however, isn't universal. Various species are self-fertile, or simply clone themselves without sex at all, and some species (of bacteria) just randomly share bits of their genomes with other species, and etc.

We're still in the primordial beginning of evolution of cryptocurrencies, and many of the features that will eventually prove out haven't yet demonstrated robust survival and domination in their niches that will someday be as obviously a good idea as teeth, or limbs. A whole lotta failure needs to happen before features are tested to destruction and the surviving mechanisms proved out.

Thanks!