Sometimes you can, yes, if you are picking the lens with which a subject will be photographed -- you can get down as low as 9mm on 135-film area, and still buy a relatively rectilinear lens.

Sometimes you can't get a rectilinear lens, though: If I want to shoot wide angle on my phone, curvilinear will have to do.

Sometimes you don't even have a lens, you've just got a photo, and that photo is curvilinear.

Novel ways to adjust for distortion are always nice to have in the toolkit.