EOS block producer cartels are fundamentally the same as centralized ethereum mining pools

I was speaking with someone who's a big supporter of Telos, a fork/successor of EOS which also uses block producers.

When I brought up the common criticism that block producers are incentivized to form cartels that can control and censor the blockchain in their favour, his counterpoint was that big mining pools in Bitcoin and Ethereum are even more centralized and have the same issues.

Now, intuitively I knew this couldn't be the case since we've seen BPs censor transactions while I don't think we've ever seen mining pools do anything similar but I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to refute what he said

So, why is it that large mining poois don't have the same power and incentive to misbehave that block producer cartels in Dpos protocols have?