Why did litecoin manage to get SegWit so fast while bitcoin is still slow and painful.
Charlie Lee managed to get everyone on board somehow. The fact that he speaks chinese is I guess a way to connect with them. He probably (and dangerously) promised miners some sort of blocksize increase in the future
Litecoin already has Lightning Network
So I doubt there will ever be a need for a block size increase. Anyway, even today Litecoin has an effective block size of 4 megabytes (if we take into account the mean time between confirmations). That basically means that Litecoin can confirm 4x more transactions than Bitcoin right out of the box. Apart from that, I don't think that Litecoin is less decentralized than Bitcoin just because there is an active leader and everyone agrees to changes proposed. It just means that people behind Litecoin are more reasonable overall. And if I'm not mistaken, Jihan was also against activating SegWit in Litecoin at first, but he likely had no other choice but to comply with the majority