I like this idea of redistributing trust. It gives you the mental toolkit to ask: where did this trust migrate? instead of getting wrapped around the axle of talking about trust vs trustlessness. And that, once you can start to talk about its migration, you might figure out what the new trust distribution portends.

One thing that jumps out at me: the core devs are the recipients of such a massive amount of trust, not in the sense that a bad actor could introduce a bug or an evil feature -- I guess that's possible, but the level of oversight vs such things is so high, that I don't worry about it. But rather: the devs choose what to work on, and they have a lot of influence with their peers, and these things, little by little, shape the values of the entire ecosystem.

Imagine if more of the early devs would have found the big block argument to be the more compelling one? There are certainly credible arguments to be made. Everything is tradeoffs, and one can hold a totally legit big-block position. That version of bitcoin would be very different one and portend different things in the world, and so that is a very powerful, trusted position. It's just not the flavor of trust that we're used to thinking about -- it dispersed in a new direction.