If basic customers could be served by a federal deposit system and more "unique" customers might look for private options that cater to their needs (basically all of SVB's customers), nothing that played out in SVB's collapse would have changed.

Probably true for SVB, but still useful for the banking system overall.

You reckon they would have been holding cash for payroll in SVB if they could have an account directly with the fed instead?

Consider the reasons why most of SVB's clients chose SVB instead of a larger, more traditional bank. The traditional banks work very slowly, are hyper-cautious with/outright deny businesses they don't understand, and if a startup did manage to get an account, its transaction maximums would be extremely limited relative to its growth. Now imagine the government is the custodian, and those problems presumably become 10x worse.

I looked up "why would a startup choose svb" and found that the reasons are those which could be fulfilled in a myriad ways:

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/silicon-valley-bank-served...

There was nothing especially "startuppy" about their traditional banking services.

Yep, precisely, Wray says as much in this lecture:

https://youtu.be/gI86w6bSmS0?t=445