Regarding you second point, the funny thing about this space is that most stablecoins don't even try or pretend to be decentralized.
This news reads like big banks and other major traditional finance players are building a database because FedNow doesn't cut it somehow?
The decentralization is my steel man of the idea. If you don't have to worry about the double spending problem, choosing a block chain instead of a normal database is just absurd.