Git's lack of centralization, i.e. a "source of truth" repo at the tool level is it's most imaginary, impractical benefit. Times where I've had to skip over origin and push to someone directly are few. Those occasions are far outweighed by a dozen annoyances that consistently come up with having to tell git "no trust me, origin is the remote I care about". Sure, you can fix it with aliases, but it's still misaligned of how most people work. I don't see the Linux kernel benefiting from it much, either.