We can certainly take the word “decentralized” out of the proposal if a lot of people object. It’s a term that is impossible to define rigorously. For example, many Bitcoin maximalists believe that no proof of stake chain can ever be decentralized.
What we can say for certain is that all consumer chains will be just as decentralized as the Cosmos Hub. Whether or not the Cosmos Hub is currently decentralized is outside of the scope of this discussion. I think it is.
The question of whether replicated security will make the Cosmos Hub less decentralized by hurting small validators is completely valid though. This is the main concern we have heard, and it will be the Cosmos Hub team’s top priority for 2023. We will be making sure that consumer chain testnets and upgrades are as smooth and regular as possible to minimize the human workload on validators. We’ll also be working with validators to review the infrastructure cost breakdown of their setups and see how we can implement code to lower it for consumer chains.
Finally, this proposal by itself does not launch any consumer chains, it just installs the code to make replicated security possible. The question of whether a given consumer chain is worth running is best asked when that consumer chain is being proposed.