BTC hasn't been PoW decentralized since 2012 when ASICs took over
If you are basing on that, then you might as well say that Bitcoin has never been POW decentralized since it's inception because from the satoshi days, the founder would find himself mining alone or with a handful of other folks.
My question is, was the Bitcoin network decentralization those days much better than it is right now?
He only mined because he wanted to keep the chain going. Once other people started to mine on their own he most likely stopped mining. So sure it was centralized because it had 1 miner pretty much but it didn’t have much value so it didn’t matter.
I think as years go on, Bitcoin becomes more and more centralized. Because back in 2012 you still had some GPU miners. And many ASICs were sold to retail home miners because the manufacture needed seed money to build more ASICs.
Now it’s different. Miner ASICs very expensive, hard to compete with cheap power deals and most ASICs are sold directly to farms instead of home miners.