"There are all these things which work on Bluesky like like counts despite it being decentralized."
That is because it's not actually decentralized. Also, I think not federating the like counts is more of a *Mastodon issue* than a *fediverse issue*.
Mastodon could do it but it wouldn't be efficient to do so.
Of course, Bluesky can do it more efficiently, they can do it more efficiently because they are mostly centralized.