> The 60M+ user base for ENS-enabled browsers is a genuinely impressive number. But at the same time it's about 1.1% of the world's total internet users. In terms of reach, it's basically like making your product a desktop Linux app — it might be the right choice for some niche, but not for any mass market.

It took time to for ENS to build this userbase and it had to start with nothing. I don't know what the final result will be with this, but I think this is a good starting point.

> For the actual ENS lookup, I presume Brave and Metamask actually call a service like Infura? It feels like that's a step back for decentralization compared to plain old DNS.

Yes. It seems like many people who are creating in this space do not actually care about decentralization.

The internet has mostly existed in peace with the governments in most democratic countries. Though, at the same time, I think even with Tor, the average person in China probably struggles to get around the firewall.

It's possible to set the RPC node for MetaMask and Brave browser. There are also extensions on GitHub that resolve from a local node. Though, this solution is probably too unrealistic for the average user. I think in the past I've seen discussions about querying nodes directly, but, I'm doubtful there's going to be more solutions soon.