And there are 7 pools that make up around 75% of the network hashrate, kind of a far cry from a couple hundred.
Yeah, but that's pretty close to
only a handful, isn't it?

And that was exactly my point,
mining has once been done by hundreds, or even thousands of individual miners and now is done by a handful of pools,
so it doesn't
end up centralized, it already is, no matter how many workers sell hashes to those pools, no matter how high the network hashrate.
However, if
everyone stops mining, bitcoin is instantly dead anyway.
