Why is the Fourier (or cosine) transform decorrelating?
Whether that decorrelation happens depends on the signals you put in – it's not a general property of the DFT!

Especially, when you model your signal as sum of narrowband signals, then you'll find that due to the DFT of a narrowband signal being concentrated on one or very few bins, and practically 0 elsewhere, the decorrelation simply stems from the fact that it's easy to represent the same signal in frequency domain with fewer non-zero coefficients than in time domain.

The fact that these non-zero coefficients are then uncorrelated amongst each other depends again on the signal model, and isn't widely true – for example, if you have a line spectrum DFT, for example from observing a rectangular wave digital signal, the lines aren't uncorrelated at all.