From what I read on discussions on the matter, apparently the resources needed for instances to talk to individual ones is proportionally much higher.

However, I’d argue most people using the fediverse seem to be fine using medium to large instances, so the impact seems to be a diminishing one.

And agreed it’s a form of independence. Besides and extrapolating from owning what you share, censorship, if/when it happens, at most is done at federation level, not on instance level, meaning it’s much harder for someone to sabotage the single-user for wrongthink or a potential (and if the user is honest, accidental) fuck up.