Agreed. It's a problem, but one with about a gazillion possible solutions. I like the idea of Pkarr / Mainline / DHT.
Other folks are working on variations of the “big indexing relay” approach (not my particular cup of tea, but it's a pragmatic solution, as much as any). We're still a long way from the point where a couple of "indexer" relays aren't enough to store a reasonably recent copy of everyone's Kind 0, 10002, and maybe a few other lists.
I've also bothered poor @Mike Dilger ☑️ a few times about the whole NIP-05 / Kind 10002 chicken-and-egg bootstrapping issue. Well-known URIs should be enough to bootstrap the Nostr experience, WKD style (if I know someone's NIP-05, I should know how to find their stuff). Search would still require centralised relays, of course, but clients wouldn't need to be this complicated.
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There are multiple ways you connect with people on nostr. By far the most common is that you find an event from a key you haven't seen before. And so that case must have a good solution. The case where you know the person and scan their business card or go to their personal URI is the easy case.
I don't like the NIP-65 solution of "spray it everywhere". It requires people to just-so-happen to look for relay lists in the same places, which drives it to be a centralized thing. I really do like the DHT solution.
But the bittorrent/mainline/Kademlia DHT handles only ed25519-signed data blobs.
I'm starting to think standing up a new DHT using all the security learnings we have at this time from published academic papers (most of them from early 10s when everybody was into it) might be where we are headed. And I would strongly suggest that such a mechanism not be tied to just one cryptosystem, but to support multiple including PQ signature schemes. It is not just the nostr social graph I want to save, it is the flexibility of signature scheme. Sure you can wave your hands and claim quantum computing will never work. I did that about AI and I was wrong.