Blacksky doesn’t just run a relay, they run an appview (way more expensive than a relay) and pds (admittedly pretty cheap).

The point of atproto isn’t to have many different groups running the entire stack, you can use an appview by one group, powered by a relay by another, while using a pds by a third.

A relay I listed in the comment is a real-world one that is currently only costing the creator $30/month, which is ingesting all PDSes, and being used by a lot of apps.

true, although no one said the contrary

While the article itself didn’t say it, the overall attitude of most people on the fediverse is that.

I do agree with you that users aren’t exposed enough to third party infrastructure, and that most users using bluesky’s servers is a problem, but the alternative is the jankiness of the fediverse, which completely puts new users off.