Agreed, if it's not fully decentralized:
  1. It might as well just be a business
  2. It is a security, with everything that implies.
I haven't looked at it recently, but Hedera was basically a company with a patented and decentralized blockchain, doing ledgers for big companies. I think that model worked fine. However, you can't call hedera "money".
Likewise Eth isn't money. Some great stuff could come out of the project anyway. But with so many of these alts, I just don't see why it couldn't be a company with redundant servers, like Google or Amazon. What does "decentralization" get you when there's a controlling entity obligated to government?