It's just an attempt at obfuscating the governance for non-technical regulators to think it's beyond the control of stripe. It's the game that all these L1s are doing, participating in the minimum amount of decentralized theater in order to evade regulations.

Given my past experiences trying to get EU-compliant invoices for Stripe transactions this is unfortunately also how I feel about the situation. This decentralization has immediate benefits for plausible deniability.

exactly. This is the main value of the "web3" era of blockchains. There's absolutely no decentralization in the way they are governed. It's just enough decentralization so that it can be argued that the users are interacting with a piece of software that the developers wrote, rather than the developers themselves, so that way there's no legal relationship between the two.

That being said, I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing...especially outside of the US/europe banking I get the impression that banking regulations are arbitrary and political and if all we get from crypto is escape from those regulations it may be worth the extra fraud and so on.

it depends, regulators can still force validators to censor. I have kept up with the scene in a minute, but i remember builders and even some wallets were dropping tx from tornado cash because of some compliance issues, dont think the trump admin would care

very well put. its been the game the whole time.