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What does "doesn't work" mean here, and who learns that lesson?

E-mail is decentralized, but every now and then a hn post pops up, complaining about how you can't run your own email server these days. Billions of people don't use email for personal communication, but use centralized apps like WhatsApp and many businesses do the same with WhatsApp, Slack and similar apps.

To me it looks like running a centralized service works really well for companies like Meta and Google and the fast majority of people pick those services over something else. I don't think many people will change their mind about this because of one outage.

E-mail is de facto centralized, because a bunch of massive actors get to decide if they want to bully you and send your emails to a blackhole.

WhatsApp is used by billions of people with minimal downtime. The fact that the outage is such a big deal flies in the face of this statement.

Decentralization is not a panacea. You just have to pick your poison.

I like decentralization but in WhatsApp's case it obviously does work for the vast majority of the time.