@damon I was trying to understand better before answering, but if you want the half-baked answer:
Mastodon is very imperfect, but tying moderation and server together gives a sense of place+identity that gives some motivation to actually do the (hard!) work of running distributed servers.
I don't understand the incentive to run bsky servers. If all interesting features are abstracted, you end up with email: a "distributed" protocol dominated, in practice, by Google and Microsoft.