Love to hear some of the alluded to "real world benefits" - I have heard none so far, just claims of things an experienced engineer can invalidate with a few minutes of work.
"Blockchains" are not just distributed databases. They are also distributed, open APIs, and consensus mechanisms for updating and managing the functionality that controls those APIs and the data that they produce.
I think about it this way: if you have one company that creates a database that many people use to build businesses around, then that company now holds a lot of power over the people who chose to build there. I believe that those people should have a say in the direction of the APIs that input/retrieve data, and ultimately should have some say in how long that database persists. The idea that we allow single entities to permanently control datasets seems absurd to me.
Now, from an engineering management perspective, think about how you manage multiple teams who have different agendas, different priorities, and different needs for those APIs and the child data. How do you govern that? How do you ensure that all nodes that replicate this data set and the APIs are up to date and not doing funny business?
This is all stuff that the decentralized community (web3) is trying to figure out together. It's DEEPLY interesting and ABSOLUTELY not "a few minutes work".
Politics and governance are topics that are, I think, a bit broad for a post in a reply on HN.
Suffice it to say that groups of dedicated people, either as loose alliances or as tightly controlled development teams, come together and make proposals for change, implement those proposals, and then push them to a network. If the network as a whole thinks it is in their interests to use it, it gets voted on and enabled. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it is entirely transparent to users. Rarely it causes a fork in a network (basically a civil war) where infrastructure providers decided to part ways and go on to support two child networks instead of one.
It's messy, as all democracies are. I think it is a beautiful process, and it has taught me a lot of valuable lessons about how groups really work, what politics really is, and how to convince people who do not want to be convinced because you believe in something fiercely.
Open networks take a lot of the best parts of FOSS and bring them to life in a way that I never thought I'd experience so intensely.