You have a point and I hope the ops will look I to that direction and come to a conclusion that Bitcoin can not witness the adoption we glamour for if it doesn't have to go through exchanges, we can not underestimate the place of exchange for crypto access
People have many choices to trade bitcoins with centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges and peer-to-peer trading platforms.
Because we don't trade bitcoin daily or trade it too more often and there are hodlers who will let their bitcoins intact for a while some time. It is important to have good bitcoin wallets to store our bitcoins.
the exchange has made access to Bitcoin fast and easy even in a restricted region exchange allow Bitcoin p2p trading which allows newbies have direct access to the bitcoin market.
Peer to peer trading can give us more freedom but it contains more risk, more chance to fall in scam trading so knowledge and experience to choose good trade partners to trade with is very important.
Exchanges may have hard their bad influence on the cryptocurrency industry most especially the centralized exchange who has been nothing but tools in the hands of regulators and CEOs who act unilateral against the customer's will and have 100% control over the balance on the exchange.
Governments do their jobs by keep most of things in their control but I disagree to say centralized exchanges are tools of regulators and governments. Before stricter regulations on cryptocurrency market, we don't have enough evidence to make this conclusion.