Isn't all DNS centralized anyway? All the records are authoritative somewhere, answered by the owning nameservers. The only distribution is in the form of mult

Isn't all DNS centralized anyway? All the records are authoritative somewhere, answered by the owning nameservers. The only distribution is in the form of multiple levels of widespread caching. As long as that caching layer exists, is there really a difference between a large company hosting many names or multiple people hosting their own nameservers? Was the web really more resilient when everyone had their own servers?