It's indeed a lamentable evolution that the promise of trustless staking in PoS systems seems to be eroding, replaced by these centralized validators. From a purely technical standpoint, this does shift the crypto landscape towards a pseudo-traditional banking model. The original appeal of crypto was the prospect of disrupting and redefining how value is stored and transacted. However, as with most developments, the implementation often does not align with the theoretical ideals.

The necessity of validators in PoS systems has been a technical compromise to address the issue of scalability and energy consumption found in PoW systems. Validators or staking pools also help smaller investors to participate in the staking and earning process. However, this doesn't necessarily condemn PoS to a future of centralization. Blockchain projects are tirelessly working towards innovative solutions. The introduction of sharding in Ethereum 2.0 and parachains in Polkadot are examples of this. There's a silver lining here; the sector is young, and the opportunity for evolution remains ripe.