Not to mention, a new groundwork for light clients was laid out in the first upgrade to the beacon chain. Come merge, clients could effectively poll for e.g. balances directly from the network, instead of going through Infura.

More on Ethereum light clients from Chainsafe, the builders of Lodestar, a Typescript implementation of an Ethereum consensus client: https://blog.chainsafe.io/the-road-ahead-for-ethereum-light-...

TL;DR: "Light clients enable more people to participate as first-class citizens, verifying on-chain data without relying on single and centralized JSON RPC endpoints."