No its not. There's plenty of open source project that have excellent security track records where no one gets paid.
Security is an easier problem to tackle in an open source project, sufficiently managed. That's not to say decentralization don't have costs. It would be a lot more efficient if we just use a group of servers managed by a few trustworthy individuals, but it's also quite vunerable to takedown by nefarious organizations. That's why bitcoin exists. Arguably, you could say bitcoin is a lot cheaper than other approaches, but you also have take into mind the mining rigs that's popping up all over the planet.
And a lot of people really don't like how bitcoin operates because it is blatantly inefficient in a lot of way.
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Also, paying gavin does not make this project more secure, it makes it LESS secure, because it creates dependencies, centralization and it gives influence through a small amount of companies that have a financial interest for themselves rather than towards the community.
You can join the Bitcoin foundation as an individual member, have more corporations join it, etc.