[zeroclip]

Smart contracts can add rollback and revert functions but it won't save them from an exploited code path. At that point the only way to 'revert' exploited funds is rolling back the entire blockchain by creating a new fork. The market will decide whether to follow the fork. It has happened once, and might happen again one day, but only at the will of the majority of users.

[arcticbull]

Not the majority of the users, the majority of the miners, influenced by leadership/the wealthy. This is plutocracy. And very much not an improvement over the status quo.

[zeroclip]

In Ethereum's proof of stake model, validators do not control the rules and cannot force a change in the protocol. People choose to run nodes, these nodes may or may not be validator nodes, and this software is what enforces the protocol rules across the network. A majority of nodes would have to come to consensus on a change for it to be successful - this happened with DAO, EIP-1559, and probably soon the PoS merge.

It is free to run a node, and the market can freely decide to not support a chain. This is how you end up with ETC being relatively worthless even though there was a group of "rich plutocratic elites" that tried to make it succeed.

There are "influencers" like Vitalik, EF, several client teams, and thousands of hobbyists who work on research and development for the protocol, and these people do lead the direction of the technology moreso than the average user. But this is how all open source works: a small number of people make decisions, and a much larger group of people opt-in to those choices, becoming users. This is also how you end up with multiple blockchains: not everybody was happy using Bitcoin, so some people started to develop Ethereum instead.