Bitcoin was created for pure p2p transactions without the involvement of 3rd party, Satoshi's vision was great! But the problem is that Satoshi's Bitcoin become popular and everything that he ever wanted for Bitcoin, went wrong. People with lots of money decided to buy Bitcoins and created Centralized Exchanges. CEXs hold a significant amount of Bitcoins. Besides CEXs, there are crypto wallet providers like Blockchain.com and Nexo (that lets you have a visa card and buy things with automatically converting Bitcoins into USD). On top of that, two countries, The USA and China are the biggest miners and pool owners. 56.1% of hashrate goes to Chinese pools, 33.6% to the United States and the rest of them - other countries.
Bitcoin failed in decentralization and in the avoidance of 3rd party financial systems. Pseudo-anonymity? It's only getting easier and easier to deanonymize Bitcoin users. On top of that, Bitcoin ETFs got approved, which basically means if you can't beat them, join them strategy and financial institutes got closer again. Mark my words, soon miners will be forced to filter transactions, i.e. disapprove transactions that government doesn't want to be approved.
Satoshi's vision was great but I think that conservative politics of developers killed this project. Bitcoin needs many updates, to fill loopholes and fix what's wrong. 2024 and 1 MB (4 MB) block size? At least if we don't change much of the code, okay, but 1 MB block size really sucks. But I think it's politics too. There are part of influential people who make money from current mess because they make tons of money. Bitcoin lost it's function as a P2P currency and instead become a store of a value.
But there is a hope, always!
Mining pools reduce decentralization, but think of them as the equivalent of states/armies in the BTC ecosystem.
When did states/armies appear and why?
They started with the dawn of civilization 10000 years ago when small tribes/bands of people started forming bigger groups to defend themselves better and to even attack other, weaker tribes.
Mining pools have the exact same philosophy: small miners banded together to form bigger entities to make solving blocks easier and far more predictable than solo mining.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a natural occurring pattern. Everything starts decentralized and slowly leans into centralization. Same thing happened to food with agriculture (hunter gatherers got their food in a decentralized manner, unlike farmers).
It is what it is. I'm not saying it's pleasant.