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.