Decades of experience have shown us the massive costs of doing so - the crippled velocity and soul crushing agony of dba change control teams, the overhead salary of database priests, the arcane performance nightmares, the nuclear blast radius, the fundamental organizational counter-incentives of a shared resource .
Why on earth would we choose to pay those terrible prices in this day and age, when infrastructure is code, managed databases are everywhere and every team can have their own thing. You didn’t have a choice previously, now you do.
You DO have to share data in other ways, usually datawarehouse or services, but that is not the same thing.
I’m not saying literally every source of data has to be shared and centrally managed. I’m also not saying “rdbms accessed via traditional client and queried via sql” when I say database. I’m just saying a shared database of some shape is inevitable.
Also, operationally it’s not “semantics” at all. You don’t get into (many) operational problems with analysts sharing a datawarehouse. You absolutely do with online apps sharing a rdbms, they aren’t the same thing.
A data warehouse is a type of database and is does need to be managed. Your assertion that it is easier to manage is orthogonal to my assertion that there will always be a central database to manage in an organization of decent size.
Being shared between applications is literally what databases were invented to do. That’s why you learn a special dsl to query and update them instead of just doing it in the same language as your application.
The problem is that data is a shared resource. The database is where multiple groups in an organization come together to get something they all need. So it needs to be managed. It could be a dictator DBA or a set of rules designed in meetings and administered by ops, or whatever.
But imagine it was money. Different divisions produce and consume money just like data. Would anyone imagine suggesting either every team has their own bank account or total unfettered access to the corporate treasury? Of course not. You would make a system. Everyone would at least mildly hate it. That’s how databases should generally be managed once the company is any real size.