The funny thing is that all of the centralization in Bluesky is defended as being necessary to provide things like global search and all replies in a thread, things that Mastodon simply punts on in the name of decentralization. But then ultimately, Bluesky has to relax those goals after all.

True. In context though Bluesky can tweak the volume knob as and when they see fit, whereas for Mastodon it's stuck where it is.