Of course they are not. What the author means here is that people create wallets without owning servers, so they are in fact delegating chain verification to thrid parties like Etherscan, rather than by themselves. This is effectively centralizing the crypto on a few entities.
Exactly, thank you. Generally, wallets need to connect to nodes, and nodes are servers. People do not run their own nodes, they connect to existing ones.
Nobody wants to download the blockchain on a desktop, start up a node, write their keys in a note pad, and configure their phone’s wallet app to point to their new locally hosted node.
God help you if you didn’t even compile your node and wallet app yourself.
Anything less than that involves trust
At least with Fiat if someone running my local Chase Bank branch siphons money out of my account, I can trust that a guy with a shiny badge will walk over with a baton to beat them up.
And more importantly there's a whole procedure for Chase to make you whole, and if Chase itself fails, FDIC steps up, and if they fail, the Fed steps up, and if they fail, the US will nuke someone.
