It's even worse. Fancier or not, centralized systems are actually bad for usability in a very important way: Users will always manage to break their local check

It's even worse. Fancier or not, centralized systems are actually bad for usability in a very important way: Users will always manage to break their local checkout or clone somehow. With git (and many other, but not all) decentralized systems, just using a plain filesystem copy as a fallback or backup, the user is easily able to recover. There are better ways, but this is an obvious one that works without the need for extensive tools, training or docs. With centralized systems, or even GitHub, the user is bound to commit/push(--force)/sync at some point, breaking the central instance, which is much harder to recover from.