The long tail of linux distributions work precisely because they need very little trust and are consumed by highly technical users who can verify all manner of things themselves. They especially don't require multi-party verification.

Broad trust is required in lots of situations. Hardware attestation, financial clearing networks, or even physical supply chains. Ie, you have multiple independent parties who need mutual, verifiable trust to operate. Establishing that requires transaction costs like audits, SLAs, legal liability, and cryptographic integration. The economics don't work for 30 different players to cross-verify each other. So, we have oligopolies...