I know your take. It has been stated by different people at different times.
I share your perspective talking about Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp and a few more. Asian unregulated CEX ran (or run?) a cartel, helping them out with liquidity.
Mt. Gox ran for three years without sufficient funds and they only got called out because they only traded Bitcoin and fiat rails got decimated.
Binance in the contrary could afford to close Monero withdrawals for months because people still saw exits (selling their paper claims). So the risk for Binance running a scheme like this was probably 50 times less than Mt. Gox doing it.
You also seem to forget that Monero ranked as high as #4 on the CMC list in 2017 before it became a primary target by states and CEX dumping to #60 in the aftermath of the meme coin pumps.
Occam's razor tells us that Monero as the successor of the original Bitcoin idea will be attacked in all ways possible. Fractional reserves are an area where banks and states collude because it results in a win-win situation. Sane is true for CEX and states.
