- For NFTs in particular, I agree that the ecosystem is way too centered around OpenSea. But things also seem to be generally moving in the right direction here too. I've seen a lot of new exchanges pop up recently, some of which put more of an emphasis on decentralization (such as zora [1]). There are also some new standards on the royalty front [2]. Exchanges may or may not pay attention to it, but it's at least a start.
- The ecosystem's current centralization around Infura and Alchemy is also concerning. But as with the other issues, I think there's a definite path towards improvement. In the meantime, choosing an Ethereum node service feels kind of like choosing an ISP. But at least I'm not bound to a single service by physical architecture.
- In the absence of any improvements to Ethereum's scalability, I don't think it has much of a future. Sure, you can do some interesting things on it today, but high gas prices and low tx throughput make it impractical for many applications and most internet users. That said, there seems to be a lot of resources being thrown at various scalability solutions. Whether or not we see them in the near future is one story, but there's at least a viable roadmap, which makes me optimistic. And I think a lot of the centralization issues are a direct result of the scalability issues. So as the latter improves, I'd expect the former to improve as well.
- I disagree with the analysis that OpenSea would be much better as a centralized service. Part of what makes it valuable is that it can (fairly easily, but no seamlessly) integrate with other software (contracts) deployed to a global public network. I'd imagine it would be very difficult for OpenSea to get off the ground if they had to build their own general purpose contract VM that thousands of people would be willing to build on top of. On top of that, it would be a lot harder to tell a convincing story about what happens to peoples NFTs if they go out of business. However, if scalability doesn't improve, I agree that OpenSea and Coinbase will likely move in an increasingly centralized direction until most of the web3 components are stripped out.
- I definitely agree that people (myself included) don't want to run their own servers, but I wonder if Ethereum's Proof of Stake will change things. Supposedly I can run a validator on a raspberry pi. So if there's enough of a financial incentive to keep one running, I may do so.
[1] https://zora.co/ [2] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981