Plenty of chains do this... Most of them (the smart contract ones, "ethereum killers" and such, since we are talking about ethereum) use delegated validator sch

Plenty of chains do this... Most of them (the smart contract ones, "ethereum killers" and such, since we are talking about ethereum) use delegated validator schemes and other such marketing speak for "centralized", unfortunately. If the network grinds to a halt because the core dev team disappears it isn't sufficiently decentralized. If a consensus network can be shut down by a small group of individuals it isn't sufficiently decentralized.