People joining for sometime now are only in it for the potential price increase and care nothing about a decentralized system.
Most of them today are for profit, out of 100 people who buy bitcoin, 99 of them are those who are looking for profits on the rising price of bitcoin because they treat bitcoin as an investment alternative not as a decentralized means of payment.
The ARR of bitcoin if calculated per year is very tempting, therefore also the institutions or governments make bitcoin one of the investment assets that they can rely on to get profits
No matter how government try to influence the market with their position, the core definition of bitcoin and her decentralization cannot be tarnished. If government try to build something by inviting a developer to draft out a unique feature that will drive users toward feeling unsafe about their investment, i think such cannot be possible because every transaction will reflect onchain which can be traced and tracked for public visibility.
Government are only be able to build centralized platform where your portfolio are controlled, minimum and maximum amount of withdrawals are imposed on your assets, kyc verifications are occurred for their own benefits and many more but at the end every waves of transaction are reflected onchain for public awareness, thats what government is not happy with, thats their point of weakness.
Institutions are only influencing the market price to favour them, but at the same time favours the holders too as well, so its win win for everybody not only big ventures.
No, the state can do a lot more than that my friend, they can intervene against the miners or who run the nodes or who verify the transactions, when bitcoin miners are tracked by the government they may be able to intervene them to do something, there are certainly people who say that they are spread out in the world, but the fun fact is that the government can pursue them to carry out the interests they want to do.
Because the truth is that the state is formed in principle to control whatever is in the public sphere, and I agree with the OP that Decentralization might be a sham when the government intervenes in running the system.