Miners are reliable as far as:
1- Provably, they are not inflating the supply of bitcoins by breaching the regulations built into the protocol.
2- There is proof that any incoming fund to a wallet approved by miners, comes with an equal deduction from the ledger maintained by them.
3- There is a safe threshold for the number of confirmations where the costs of rewriting the blockchain outperform any criminal incentive for defrauding users by orders of magnitude.
It's actually because of the full nodes. They secure the network, to make sure the miners are following the rules, and make sure to mine the type of blocks that the full nodes demand.
Plus, https://twitter.com/bitcoinmagazine/status/1197161029832265729
You are rehashing the same argument the old "Don't trust, verify" thing
BUT, it isn't wrong. Full nodes do secure the network FROM bad-actors. Including if the bad-actor is a miner.
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which has fed the community up. It'd be a good occasion to make a re-assessment, I suppose and will do my best to help.
The entities who want to co-opt Bitcoin are fed up, not the community. "Don't trust, verify" is, and SHOULD always be part of Bitcoin's ethos.