I'm a Bitcoin mining operator, that game theory isn't true.
Mining pools that play by the rules earn more stable income than those seeking "extra" income from supposedly spam transactions. Since they aren't wasting their resources trying to cater to specific groups of people. Unlike Marathon which is basically one entity and not a pool by the traditional meaning. They're basically one big miner mining blocks. Even then the rewards they earn goes to them and not paying out miners like in other pools.
If I pay more sats to get in a block and I make it where people with less sats are unable to enter into the most recent block. Does that make me a bad person? The answer is no, I paid the fees and someone put in the work to mine the block. They didn't choose me in specific to mine the block, but mined the block that was in queue and received my fees that I paid.
Mining itself may look centralized, but miners are incentivized to play by the rules than trying to make pure profit. The mining pool Ocean is centralized by nature due to there not being another Datum based pool for people to rotate to if Ocean starts censoring blocks. Unlike stratum V2 which there are a few pools running it that you can retreat to if a mining pool starts censoring blocks.
Also many mining pools have plebs and other people mining with them. For example Braiins pool has pleb miners mining with them, F2Pool have people mining with their Canaan gear, Luxor for many of the hosted miners, etc. There are very few corporate miners mining in all the pools, foundry is a good one where there are plebs and small mining operations in there too. To say its nothing but corporate is just spitting in the face of people making mining gear for plebs like Skot9000 with the Bitaxe and canaan with their home miners, and braiins with their mini miner.
Stop blindly following the propaganda that Luke Dashjr and Knots ideological groups spew and start understanding how mining works and how Bitcoin works. Do I agree with the changes core made, no but that's why we can run other versions or implementations.