The benefits of decentralization do come at a cost of efficiency and throughput and they are often harder to quantify or justify unless one takes a harder look at the fully loaded cost of centralization.
As an example, consider the fact that MacDonald’s is by far the most prolific restaurant in the world or that GMO crops undoubtedly yield more productivity per acre than heirloom crops. In both cases centralization and standardization of the process has led to huge productivity gains, but at what expense? What have we lost in the process?
I would argue that monoculture and food homogenization engineered to maximize calories out per $ in have come at the cost of diversity.
Diversity of ideas, strategies, goals, ownership and agency all result in a society that, while productive, is less resilient.
Look at the various fungal plagues that have blighted banana production over the years. Monoculture brought huge yields but at the expense of resilience as a single fungus nearly wiped out the original Gros Michel variety and now a new fungus threatens the same for the Cavendish.
Similarly, Bitcoin is an inefficient network for transmitting fiat compared to Visa when measured against the criteria payment networks are usually measured on. Ethereum takes huge resources to run the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi as a global state machine.
Measuring decentralized systems vs centralized purely on efficiency and throughput kind of misses the forest for the trees. Decentralized systems have value that isn’t always obvious to a superficial analysis such as this one. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Often the largest paradigm shifts look like toys to start. (See Clayton Christianson and disruptive innovation.)