@incre_ment yeah, I think there is a lot of room to improve the process still with regard to that kind of thing; it's really easy to get wrong in ways that are annoying to debug (as a fedi problem but also as a broader user-empowerment problem for oss in general)
but (and you probably do understand this already) comparing a PDS to a full fedi node isn't really a 1:1 comparison because the PDS is useless on its own and will only ever be accessed thru the centralized index, which is run by engineers who are accountable to shareholders
it seems like their claims of decentralization keep coming back to the theoretical possibility that someone else could run an index, but it sounds like that is very far away from reality right now