And yet, a lot of people have been confused into thinking things like The Cloud are decentralized.

I’m not sure how this got broken, but a few powerful companies seem to be running with it.

Well, relative to the tiny datacenter you might have for an office, it's "decentralized"... but yes, only in a marketing sense.

The bar for grasping decentralization fatally flexible and bends very low.

As in "If you can't immediately name the individual who has the majority of leverage over the operation of X, then X is decentralized" low.

It's little more than an incantation at this point; the only proven implementation is as a sort of verbal ink blot test for identifying marks.

Sorry, who in their right mind thinks the Cloud is decentralized? It is literally the opposite.

It is descentralized across corporations. Pretty much a cartel.