Torvalds liked to code on planes back when you couldn't use the internet and that's just about the only use-case I've ever heard where I agree distributed makes sense.

Kids these days can't even code at all without chat-GPT, there's a central server hosting the git repo anyway, the whole architecture feels like it was designed for dial-up.

I can't think of anything that was doable 30 years ago compute and bandwidth-wise, that we can't do today due to performance reasons, except client-server source control...