Consider Bitcoin for example. The rules are incredibly strict. You basically have no choice but to obey all of the rules in order to participate. They will not budge, and they were devised by one person, which calls to mind "central" and "control" but is just the opposite. Those rules are carefully constructed to allow the system to be completely decentralized. No permission is needed to participate. No one has the power to veto or alter your contributions. Simply obey the rules and no one else can have power over you.
The distinction you are making about federal vs municipal control isn't about centralization vs decentralization, it's just about the scale of centralization. Municipalities are small, but they still have a single bottleneck at the mayor/city council.
The reason this matters is that a rule-based decentralized system provides a structure that you can rely on. You can make a plan for compliance, and be reasonably assured that it will work. With centralized planning, even at if the central office is only governing something as small as an HOA, then there is no plan you can make which has an assurance of success. You are at the whim of the planners who have veto power.
This turns planning into a stochastic game where your plans need to have redundancy at every level in order to have high probability of success, which increases cost and slows the pace of development substantially.