Big assumption that a distributed system has to serve “people” and have “responses.”
A distributed system might be, for example, the ACH system: all batch, all store-and-forward, no replies flowing down the line, only processed message response batches dropped off “eventually” in outboxes.
Or, for another example: any workload manager, whether on an HPC cluster or your local Kubernetes node. No synchronous workload execution; just async batch scheduler enqueue with later best-effort status querying.
