Panels + lithium battery does not yet make "traditional power distribution obsolete". I have a net-zero adobe house with its own grid-tied 6.6kW array. The additional cost at this time of sufficent storage to go off-grid without significant life style changes (none of which would be particularly awful, but still big) is substantial. I have no doubt it will decrease rapidly, but we're not there yet.

Sure, for rural and some kinds of suburban areas, your comments are on point. For rural, they're even more or less the default. For suburban, it can be hard to tell where "community service" would end and "what we do today" would start.