> Something that should be a bit of a warning flag is that I have two decades of identity-related experience but I still have no idea what DID even is.
I'm not sure this is the "flex" you wanted it to be. A cursory look at the specification gave me a pretty good idea what DID are supposed to be, and for (and I would only say I know enough identity-related stuff in order to implement things in my own services, but not over two decades). The use cases are relatively easy to understand, and there is bunch of implementations in the wild as well.
Maybe it would also help by looking at some of the proposed DID methods that are more similar to the approach you're used to. While not centralized, maybe DNS is something you're more familiar with, so you can link it together with existing knowledge?
What exactly is it you don't understand? Maybe your knowledge about centralized identity management is not helping you in this case, but making it harder to understand.
I'm not sure this is the "flex" you wanted it to be. A cursory look at the specification gave me a pretty good idea what DID are supposed to be, and for (and I would only say I know enough identity-related stuff in order to implement things in my own services, but not over two decades). The use cases are relatively easy to understand, and there is bunch of implementations in the wild as well.
Maybe it would also help by looking at some of the proposed DID methods that are more similar to the approach you're used to. While not centralized, maybe DNS is something you're more familiar with, so you can link it together with existing knowledge?
In that case, the specification for the `did:dns` method, using DID together with DNS might be helpful for you: https://danubetech.github.io/did-method-dns/
What exactly is it you don't understand? Maybe your knowledge about centralized identity management is not helping you in this case, but making it harder to understand.