I think this is true for most situations.
If you want to trade a 20usd for an Amazon card, you can certainly use a p2p solution, or some merchant or whatever...
But for people who are heavily invested in bitcoin and want to trade high values, this is not feasible.
Would you dare trade 1 or 2 btc in a p2p? This is very risky, and an exit scam is a real possibility. Additionally, people who live in developing countries mostly don't have an USD/EUR account, which narrow a lot p2p possibilities.
People who live in developing countries and who don't have a bank account are certainly not the major part of the ones who need to sell 1 or 2 BTC at a time in a rush. Besides, things have changed a lot in the last decade, you don't need to transfer USD from an USD to an USD account, you can simply pay a guy from your currency to his national currency the same way, automatic fx exchange is the norm now.
Also, how will a guy with no bank account use a Cex to sell his coins?
I really want to skip a few years till this whole FOMO of missing a x10 return a year finally dies down and we start thinking less of investing and trading and more of real-life usage. Oh, wait, that thing Bitcoin was built to be!
you can just do 4,5, 6 hops... It is quite cheap to make an on chain transaction with 1-2 sats bytes.
Except that if we exclude a one-week interval there hasn't been any possibility of sending a below 6sat/b fee in the last 6 months.
If you don't split the inputs and outputs you're not doing anything so easily from a 4 cents tx of 1/1 input-output you need a 2$ tx with at least 4 times the size. Multiply that by 5 hops, then think of what extra transactions will do to the fees if 10,000 people will do so and, it stops becoming that trivial.
On the other hand, trading 2, 3, or even 5 bitcoin is quite secure in the biggest centralized exchanges.
Yeah, it was perfectly secure in both MtGox and FTX case, big, old, trusted exchanges....