A "huge beefy cloud instance" comes with a premium price, especially if you're planning to use it for a year or two, while also coming with its own set of problems: No internet connection? No luck! Downloading dependencies for your backend? Start paying per GB downloaded, and so on.

> ‘Distributed’ doesn’t mean ‘many’ - it’s distributed over two.

A client<>server architecture is generally not considered "distributed" unless there is multiple servers involved, at least how the terminology have been understood until today, if it changed suddenly.

Usually when it comes to these kind of architectures, you'd refer to them as "thin clients", and the architecture has been around since mainframes if not longer.

> A "huge beefy cloud instance" comes with a premium price

Ok? What's that got to do if it's useful or not.

> Usually when it comes to these kind of architectures, you'd refer to them as "thin clients"

Ah well the difference here is the client does a lot more work - it's running the editor, the editing and the editor state, it's not just transmitting input and receiving drawing commands.

Distributed program vs distributed computing. One is anything from MMORPGs to P2P to thin clients. The other is for heavy computations distributed across a network of task processing nodes.