The gold standard was decentralized. Over a century of monetary policy has shown that decentralization isn't aligned with political or economic goals.

The issue is what constitutes a sufficient amount of "decentralization". Extremists who may or may not have ulterior motives seem to oppose any change which by their estimation might decrease the decentralization. They want to minimize the cost of running a full node without consideration for the fact that optimizing that to the extreme causes transaction fees to go parabolic and thus also prices less well off users out of participating in the network and if the fees are too expensive to transact why would you run a full node for a network you can't use. There is no balance in their thinking.