It could be an application frontend interfacing with a webservice or network service. That component handles the database. That could make implementations clean

It could be an application frontend interfacing with a webservice or network service. That component handles the database. That could make implementations clean for migration from on-prem to cloud, or if you're ripping out the frontend stack semi-regularly as more web-oriented devs may do more often. I can't say I disagree, and moving an application to this model myself so that I can easily migrate it from a WinForms frontend to Blazor SPA at some point.