making economic bets on next block producer encourages collusion and cooperation rather than competition

vitalik ignores collusion & centralization aspect of that critique completely and even shows that they will literally punish validators that disagree with status quo even if they are the majority:

the idea that we can create a protocol where it is expensive for the validators to attack the protocol, even if they are a majority.

as long as there are at least some "honest" nodes that refuse to follow along a malicious majority, such an attack is expensive.

Minority deciding for majority literally is centralization.

Lets also remember they used a 72% premine and regular ICO for distribution which already suggest centralization in casper. And literally nothing has changed about eth centralization demonstrated before such as abusing codebase, holding funding and updates hostage to get anything they want to happen and decide which chain is real:

note how Vitalik brings up carbon vote as example in low voter turn out. he forgot to mention that his vote was "official" for only 12 hours and yet they still used it to justify coding bailout of money (including vitalik's and other core devs money) set to default - effectively creating new tx that confiscated money from people they disliked.