If only there was a way to distribute version control and
not rely on a central entity
But even for just version control for most use cases you need some common remote for people to push and pull to. Even a bare git setup has the potential of going down and putting people in the exact same boat that they are in now (they can commit locally, but can't push).
All these startups who experience a 100% dev outage when github or gitlab go down are fundamentally broken.
On this I totally agree. Although if you have deploys fully automated and gated behind CI/CD checks (which in many cases is required for compliance), how do you structure things such that a total outage of the CI/CD platform doesn't knock the dev cycle?