Yes that's true. However it's silly to choose every user being able to run a full node over every user being able to write to the blockchain. There's no point in being able to read the blockchain if you can't write to it.
Practically, you don't need to independently validate the blockchain. You can rely on dozens of blockchain explorers to do that. You do however need to be able to write your own transactions to the blockchain to have any degree of control over your own funds. The 1 MB limit effectively prioritizes the former over the latter, which is something that was never part of Bitcoin's original roadmap, or what Satoshi would have recommended:
>it's silly to choose every user being able to run a full node over every user being able to write to the blockchain
There's no purpose in asking a user to run a full node to write to a blockchain. A user/client runs a node to verify they've been paid. If you're trusting someone else to tell you you've been paid, you have centralization. The entire purpose of bitcoin is to receive payments without a trusted, third-party intermediary. Only the people who can run nodes can tell they've been paid.
>>There's no purpose in asking a user to run a full node to write to a blockchain. A user/client runs a node to verify they've been paid.
This is a totally illogical statement.
You can't get paid if you can't write to the blockchain. How are you going to spend what you're paid if you can't afford to write to the blockchain?
>>If you're trusting someone else to tell you you've been paid, you have centralization.
I've already addressed this: the risks associated with relying on a dozen blockchain explorers to validate the blockchain are nothing compared to the risks of relying on someone else to hold the private key that controls your funds.
What they're all going to lie about what transactions are happening on the blockchain? It's open source, public domain data. There's no limit to the number of sources you can poll until you get a confident estimate of the true state of your transaction. Consequently, the feasibility of such a deception being pulled off is astronomically low.
In other words, you're advocating throttling write-access to the point that the Bitcoin-Core blockchain is not able to provide practical utility to the vast majority of the human population, to ward off a total non-risk.
In the future we expect fees to increase (as they must for security purposes), but the idea that someone that can afford to run a full node will not be able to afford to insert a transaction does not hold up under basic scrutiny.
>>You can currently add a transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain for (converted) approximately one US cent.
That's irrelevant. The only reason you can get away with a low fee on the Bitcoin Core blockchain at the moment is that it's not operating at capacity. As soon as adoption picks up again, fees will start to climb - they have to because capacity is constrained. At any globally significant level of usage, fees will be astronomical.
Remember, as recently as December 2017, BTC's average transaction fee reached $30.
>> but the idea that someone that can afford to run a full node will not be able to afford to insert a transaction does not hold up under basic scrutiny.
That's absurd. 1 MB of space in each block allows for a maximum of 604,800 transactions being written to the blockchain a day. There is no way that fees for writing to the blockchain wouldn't skyrocket, far out of reach of ordinary users, at any significant level of adoption.
Just to be clear: the Bitcoin developers do recommend you run a full node. It is the only way to independently validate the entire chain.