Who would have owned the centralization? I always thought that one of the lovely parts of the WWW was that anyone could have a part of it in theory, even if it was easier to let someone else host your website for you.
I think in the "ideal world" we could get higher-level protocols on top of WWW, perhaps offering document persistence and global search. E.g. they could function in a federated way.
We had a lot of interesting experiments -- Freenet, bittorrent, IPFS, "Semantic Web", ActivityPub -- but we haven't seen anything which directly competes with centralized services. Of course, it is hard to compete with well-capitalized companies. But also there might be over-reliance on "startups". As Peter Thiel explained, "startups" generally want to build monopolies, as you can't really make money by offering a commodity. So it's not really surprising that Google dropped support for XMPP, for example - they'd rather keep users within the ecosystem.