Can I still hold my own keys, run my own validating node, choose my own software, construct and broadcast any consensus-valid transaction, reject invalid blocks, and refuse upgrades without needing anyone’s permission?
If any of those answers becomes no by design, that is where I would start using the word capture seriously.
I think people are trolling when they say running a lightning node is hard, expensive or that people get forced closures and lose funds. It's just not true.
The #bitcoin community is conducting a constitutional dispute before there has been a constitutional violation; the technical stakes of the current dispute are relatively small, while the perceived future governance stakes are enormous.
With SV2 or DATUM, miners can choose their own block templates while still using the pool for payouts, so they don’t need to build their own pool. It's about what do the people with machines want: just payouts or they also want to control over the block templates. If it's the latter, they vote by only choosing the pools that provide necessary measures for this. Other pools lose share and slip into irrelevance or move along the lines dictated by the demand.
I am afraid the people with the machines do not care or outright do not want this. That's a bigger problem that awaits any coin that goes big. The final boss: deep pockets and infinite cash.
While it is convenient to think that five companies control mining, I think the genuinely interesting number to investigate is physical hashrate ownership: MARA + CleanSpark + Riot + IREN + Bitdeer + Bitmain-related operations + large private farms, etc. That would tell us whether Bitcoin's actual ASIC ownership is concentrated in 5, 20, 100, or 10,000 economic entities. That number is far more relevant than the pool pie chart.