The rise of decentalised exchanges have helped a lot of small projects in this regard. Now they don't have to worry about paying big bucks to the centralized exchanges to list their tokens.
This is true, some few good projects which list on uniswap for free are doing, even though there are so many scam projects taking advantage of uniswap and other dex like bamboorelay, forkdelta to list scam tokens. A good centralized exchange with high trading volume is necessary, but uniswap trading volumes surpass many CEX nowadays.