I'm not really a fan of byteball consensus model, but I think there is a problem with your mining pool argument in favor of BTC consensus model: Bitmain produces almost all of the mining hardware used to mine, and there is speculation that not only antpool is a Bitmain in house mining pool, but that f2pool, viabtc, gbminers, and BTC.top are all basically just Bitmain mining with their own hardware under the guise of decentralization. This is only speculation, except for the bit about Bitmain producing almost all the hardware which is fact, but if true there is really a single entity dominating the Bitcoin network.
Both bitcoin and byteball have their strengths. Different consensus, yet advantage for both.
With bitcoin, it is technically true that if you really want to you can run your own miner, buy it develop it, however you like, mine. Disadvantage is of course, only rich people can afford it. So you as normal user are left to trust the miners and rely on their service, for which they take a fee, which they set.
With byteball, if you want to run a witness, you can, but you have to convince politically other people to use it, otherwise its gonna cost you money for nothing in return. As a normal user, you can use byteball however you like and you/we choose who will be witness and receive the network-decided amount of fees.
What I have learned from following bitcoin since 2010, is that no matter how decentralized and distributed a software is, (bitcoin wins in this regard its software/protocol/consensus is more decentralized, more distributed), there is still a politically self-imposed leadership of highly authoritarian style who try to rule it and possibly harm it for their own gain. The guardinas of the software, the custodians of the forums.
With byteball this human nature is set in the consensus of the software - witnesses. We users choose them, we pick them, and if they misbehave, we remove them.
So, the "more centralized", yes, only 12 instead of 10000x miners (not mining pools), the strength is, they are easier to change and adapt to users. Despite being a weakness as well in case of hostile governements around the world - global adversary.
But, I think the global adversary would also find more use of Byteball than try to forbid it, like money is useful.