It appears that on steemit/hive/DPoS only elected witnesses have incentive to run a node, is it true?
A decentralized network of RPC nodes are important especially for activists
1- They reduce the risk of IP address tracking by nodes controlled by malicious governments and hopefully disappoint them from doing such project
2- They reduce risk of split-world attack which seems DPoS very vulnerable to, in comparison to to PoW and PoS. Because you have removed causal miners/validators which were auditors for block headers (ISP could not lie to them because a reward was involved)
For bootstrapping please see:
@mahdi-nerd/safe-bootstrapping