> distributed systems are hard.

While this may be true, the central issue is a different one: most users and/or developers are not very privacy-conscious, so they don't consider it to be worth the effort to solve the problems that go in hand with such distributed systems.

In the case the author presents there is one solution - last write wins. Which while simple to implement is not really satisfactory for many use cases.

Someone could write a whole slew of changes locally and someone else can eliminate all their work because they have an outdated copy locally and they made a simple update overriding the previous person's changes.

That's why git has merges and conflicts - it doesn't want to lose changes and it can't automatically figure out what should stay in case of a conflict.