I'm with Matt Corallo on the "centralization is very concerning" issue but the nuclear option isn't going to fix anything at all neither.

Has anybody tried to shed light on to why pools are centralized? I read claims about pay-per-share needing a deep balance sheet and stuff but I've been theorizing about this since ten years now that an attacker wouldn't need to buy and operate 51% of all mining equipment. They only need to run a pool that pays out more than the competition. How expensive is that? Let the pool operate at a loss and you kill all competing pools.

I think this is how nation state adoption of Bitcoin mining looks like. You don't need to build huge mining farms to control the hash rate. You only need to recruit big mining farms to mine what you want to get mined.