I would argue it's demonstrably wrong to say that the web isn't decentralized, however the thing about web3 is that it means a dozen different things to different people. For some it's all about a vision of the web where everything is gated behind cryptocurrency payments, for some it's a world where websites, apps, and games rely on blockchain data instead of self-hosted DBs, for others it's a world where most software vendors have acquiesced to a business model where all digital products are minted as NFTs. There are many other visions, but in my view, all these ideas have glaring problems that make them fundamentally unworkable.

> Yeah, so... why on Earth do people keep saying that it is centralized?

Cryptocurrency culture fosters dishonesty: billions of dollars have been poured in by people who think it’s an investment they’ll get a large return from. The only way they profit is from other people putting real money in, which means everyone involved has to be a marketer.

That’s why crappy generative artwork will get talked up as nauseum, people will wax rhapsodic about logging in using a third-party service, etc.: the people saying that know they will lose money if the rest of us don’t agree that their random hashes are worth more than they put in.