Thank you for this explanation. Not being a techie myself, I was hearing a lot of people saying that it didn't really matter, it was just the front end of steemit dot com that was in danger, and using a different front end like steempeak would be fine. That struck me as odd but I didn't know how the nodes worked until reading this and now I see that no, the dapps are indeed dependent on steemit inc. I hope they are successful in getting the properly decentralized nodes set up!