That's certainly true, mate. Compared with TRON's Justin Sun, I think that Vitalik has less involvement in the Ethereum project's direction that I've thought it would be. As you've said earlier, there are many developers working on the project with geographical diversity. This makes Ethereum much more decentralized than most other smart contract platforms on the market today (like EOS or TRON). Vitalik Buterin could be an advisor for the project, instead of its leader. That way, Ethereum could lead in the right direction. I was surprised to see how a rumor of Vitalik's death, led to a massive decline in ETH's price some time ago. This shows us that people directly link the Ethereum project to the founder itself. If he dies, prices will go down the drain. A recovery will be feasible, but it will take longer than usual.
What's important here is that the project remains as decentralized as possible. If the community works together with Vitalik, the Ethereum project could reach new heights. Some say that Ethereum is much more decentralized than Bitcoin, due to its wide diversity of geographically distributed nodes. In other words, ETH nodes are more distributed worldwide than those on the BTC network. All in all, time will tell us if Ethereum will be able to maintain its decentralization or all the other way around. Just my thoughts