That's weird, it's almost like the basic premise of cryptocurrency was flawed from the beginning.

Is it? Or are you letting perfect be the enemy of good?

Cryptocurrencies might not be perfectly immune to centralization, but even with their problems they're far less prone to centralization than any other sort of currency short of reverting to gold coins or seashells - and you can't exactly use gold coins and seashells for online payments.

What would you say “the basic premise” is?

Wait, you are saying that people with more capital have more power under capitalism?

I disagree. If you can design a PoW system where the distinguishing factor between profitable mining and unprofitable mining is the depreciation of generic hardware, then the public will generally have control over the network so long as the public owns most of the world's generic computing power as opposed to some special interest group like ASIC miners.

This is exactly what Chia (https://www.chia.net) has done by using hard drive storage space to hold the proofs. This allows the generic hardware of general purpose computers with hard drives to operate profitable and energy efficient full nodes on the network. Especially if these are existing machines people already own. Also, the computing infrastructure needed to farm (mine) the plot files (files holding the proofs) is minimal enough that it can be run from a Raspberry Pi.