Yes it’s total madness to synchronize and replicate complex state that logically belongs together. This is why microservices are such hot garbage. Well, how people tend to use them anyway.

Monotonic state is also better than mutable state. If you must distribute state, think ownership. Who owns it? Eg Theres nothing necessarily wrong with having state owned by eg a mobile client that can be adjusted by the user. Then you can sync it to the backend if you want, but they are only a reader/listener, and should never try to control it directly.