pools are not much of a problem as they don't control the HW. ASICs inherently bring centralization pressure.
ASIC bring additional centralization pressure without imposing a cost on the maker of the ASIC, it rewards the ASIC maker, it makes centralization even more profitable.
...which is why Monero switched to RandomX, making ASICs virtually impossible
A malicious pool can pay to rent the POW by whoever has the general purpose HW and do what they want with it, there is no need to actually own any hardware, ASIC or otherwise to get-
-Majority POW power, all it takes is paying above market rate to rent the hash in a pool. There is no way around that. However, there are non-51% attack reasons why ASICs are bad.
And ASICs still has the rent problem + additional issues, so it is no better at some things and worse at other things.
