Frankly speaking, exchanges are also a part of the cryptocurrency industry and even an indispensable part. I believe that all cryptocurrency investors will at least use 1 or 2 centralized exchanges, only a rare few will use no centralized exchanges at all. We should not deny the role of centralized exchanges and their contributions to the cryptocurrency industry.
We cannot deny that centralized exchanges also played a vital role in spreading awareness of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It helped many users to know about Bitcoin. But I assume, you don't really care about privacy concerns. Just imagine you have submitted your personal documents in a centralized exchange and a few years later you notice that your life become a living hell because of that. There is a story where a romanian guy was arrested because they said this did some crimes while he is aware of anything. Then they figured out that his personal information were stolen and the criminals used his info do to the crimes. This is identity theft. Even coinbase sold their users info on the darknet.