Many people bought that automobile. It has been great to them (huge gains), and offered many advantages.
But I believe that there will be better tech. It's just that most people don't know it, and don't recognize it when it's there. I think that 95% of people here, including myself, do not understand the tech deeply enough to make a judgement whether it will be successful or not. That's why I try to collect as many arguments as possible from critics.
One of the aspects I don't fully understand are the differences in terms of centralisation between bitcoin and various altcoins.
Centralisation in the sense that no government can trace who paid who. Who owns what.
That is what they want to know, so they can restrict it and tax the shit out of people.
With bitcoin I don't think this can succeed. So they would have to go after the exchanges and try to regulate them, attacking BTC that way.
Sure better technologies will come, as you have stated yourself there is a degree that the potential and the benefit of the underlying technologies themselves are known to the public. But as of now, I believe there is hardly any cryptocurrency that competes with Bitcoin, in the whole sense. Within the aspects of game theory, economics, decentralization, etc.
About centralization, well, the government does indeed have the button to block a centralized exchange, but it doesn't mean a thing for the network itself. It is possible because the way of how bitcoin ecosystem works are maintained by thousand of nodes. There is also an alternative for the centralized exchange, Bisq for example, which it works in a decentralized manner. So, goverments can not simply just outright total ban Bitcoin, there will always be a person or a country that embraces it.