It's certain that some exchanges are lying about how much they have in reserve, but you are right - they still hold millions of bitcoin.
I'm just interested in how far these lies go, because in the case of Coinbase, I remember that we had several discussions on the forum about which CEX has the most BTC in its possession, and at the beginning of 2020 some estimates were that Coinbase had a little less than 1 million BTC. Now, a little less than 3 years later and everything that happened in the meantime, Coinbase claims to have even 2 million BTC - and all the time we read about
"huge outflows from exchanges".
According to a report published by data source xxx, Coinbases cold wallets contained roughly 970,000 BTC, worth about $8 million, at the beginning of this year. A graph shared with xxx readers shows that the exchanges bitcoin holdings have been growing steadily.
In a series of tweets, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the largest US-based crypto exchange platform holds about 2 million BTC, which translates to $33.12 billion at Bitcoins current price of $16,561.
As long as centralized exchanges exist there will be people who are dumb enough to leave their coins on them, but we should be happy to see that number reducing.
I hope that people's habits will change, especially after what happened with FTX and before that with the so-called stablecoin from Kwon, or with dozens of smaller CEXs that failed in one way or another in the last ten years.