I got into bitcoin about 2 years ago. Strange to me how little people worry about decentralization of mining.
Decentralization is like the key to everything. The price should rise the more decentralized it is too!
Discussion
the independent nodes keep the network decentralized and really enforce the rules. Read up on the block size war culminating in 2017's NY agreement and the subsequent failure of the bitcoin cash fork (tl'dr is the power players couldnt increase the block size). also consider downloading and running Bitcoin Core to become a node on the network
I still don't like coming anywhere close to mining centralization. Don't want to give governments/entities even a miniscule chance of censoring transactions.
a pool having over 51% is indeed a risk, but the ability to almost instantly repoint hash power is a comforting reality of the system