Local-first / desktop apps were really easy back in early 2000's and before since users pretty much only had a single device.
Today, users have many devices with many different storage and compute constraints. They also expect their data to be available on all devices and, to top it off, be able to invite outside collaborators.
Handling this heterogenous landscape of devices and collaboration is much simpler in a cloud model. Trying to put more data and compute locally suddenly means worrying about a multitude of device profiles and multi-way sync.
That surely.. depends. I agree that the syncing requirements can make a centralized cloud architecture benefitial.
But there are many services where this is not the case, where a local first architecture would be benefitial.
If the snappiness of your application is of any priority you will have to do a lot of local caching anyways. I don't say local first is always the right approach (it isn't), but that there are many remote first apps out there which would be better if they had been done local first (e.g. because the state they are syncing is trivially simple).
Local-first / desktop apps were really easy back in early 2000's and before since users pretty much only had a single device.
Today, users have many devices with many different storage and compute constraints. They also expect their data to be available on all devices and, to top it off, be able to invite outside collaborators.
Handling this heterogenous landscape of devices and collaboration is much simpler in a cloud model. Trying to put more data and compute locally suddenly means worrying about a multitude of device profiles and multi-way sync.