You want people to agree on which chain is the main chain, so that you can only add things to the list, and you can't go back or substitute it with another list without breaking proof of work.
The purpose of bitcoin is to make people agree that a spent transaction is irrevocably spent.
https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chainarchive
Crypto is more and more centralised because the hardware to run your own node is now thousands of dollars. That is without even getting into miners...It is kinda failing.
1) You don't need an archive node to fully verify the current state of the chain. A full geth node in full sync mode (about 600gb) will process every transaction of every block and get you the current state. You only need an archive node if you want the history of each account and contract separately indexed.
2) Folks that do want an archive node can now use much more space efficient clients then geth such as erigon (1.4tb) or besu (1.2 tb) if they want to run a block explorer or query the state of an account in the past.
2) Erigon has horrible bugs and is missing data. I filled a ticket against one such issue and they "fixed" it by making the exception go away and returning null. Their lack of attention to detail made me abandon the project.
If you know someone in the project I can produce MANY examples and would be willing to do so because running an archive geth node sucks.