Code hasn’t been law for “defi” since Ethereum reverted the DAO hack in 2016. Then the DAO went defunct later that year anyway!
The only thing to decide was if they would let the hacker get away with at the time 15% of the whole supply. If they did that it would have endangered the decentralization of the eventual proof-of-stake switch.
So they decided to kill it outright?
The distribution of ETH was less decentralized before the hard fork than afterwards. 15% of the whole supply in one hand is quite a concentration in the distribution.
So the solution to save "decentralization" was for a centralized cabal to literally rewrite history?
Given that this incident resulted in the Ethereum/Ethereum Classic split, the "centralized cabal" was not very effective. The community voted with their feet and many went to Ethereum Classic.
Your argument is circular; “code isn’t law because I’ve redefined the word ‘law’ to explicitly preclude it”.