I'm not going to speak for OP, but I definitely remember it also being a rallying cry for Bluesky too. "No one person can control the network blah blah blah"

That's not at all incompatible with Bluesky having a funded company with a CEO.

The term they use for this is "credible exit" - designing the entire protocol such that if the company itself misbehaves the affected users can leave to a separate instance without losing their relationships or data.

Bluesky's claims of being decentralised were always way way ahead of the de-facto reality of it. That's not the same as Mastodon.

It has been a "rallying cry" but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny of how Bluesky actually functions: an "open protocol" with one central server means little. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, and maybe it is changing, see https://blacksky.community/ . But this is not the same as Mastodon, where it's been that way for a while.