>There's a trend at the moment to view everything as a distributed system, but if you treat a client as a tool for viewing information and calling APIs, it seems a lot simpler.

Ok, I guess I must have misunderstood. If you're the guy whose building on-top some synchronization layer, then yeah, it's not really a problem. The sync layer is just another controller that manipulates your model or another consumer of your model changes.

If you're the guy implementing the synchronization layer, then you are thinking of distributed systems.