The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs.
What does this even mean? How do you determine the value of decentralisation and what's its fair cost? Why do people (miners?) bear those costs then?
It means that the only "pro" of crypto over, for example, Visa or Mastercard or Venmo or any other means of transferring money/value is the fact that it is decentralized. You don't have to trust anyone, whereas with Venmo, you're giving a company control of your funds. The cost of crypto vs these systems is that it is WAYYYY slower, not scalable, more expensive in many cases, and requires the use of a massive network that consumes stupid amounts of energy even when it is less than 1% of the size it would need to achieve the dream of replacing fiat currency. It's just not worth it.
Furthermore, blockchain technology necessarily requires cryptocurrency, which is something people seem to overlook or not understand. Without some kind of digital token, there is no way to incentivize miners.
Wrong. You only need tokens for decentralised, trustless, anyone-can-participate blockchains. You can have 'private', tokenless blockchains run by authorised nodes.
Actually it is right and you pretty much just admitted it. A centralized and non-trustless blockchain like the one you are describing is completely pointless. You are better off using a database, which would be WAY faster and WAY fewer computational resources.
Betting on blockchain is the same as betting on crypto, and crypto is even more overhyped than blockchain technology itself.
Blockchain-based cryptos are more overhyped than entire blockchain tech? Isn't it like saying "my legs weight more than my entire body"?
Cryptocurrencies are more overhyped than blockchain technology itself. The two ideas are commonly viewed as if they aren't coupled together even though they are. I'm not saying it makes sense.