> Curious why you’d need/want whole home gfi
Because the danger they protect against is not confined to bathrooms and the outdoors!
An RCD (GFCI) trips quickly when there is an imbalance between outgoing and returning current exceeding a certain threshold, indicating that some current is likely leaking to earth. A little more than 30mA AC through the body sustained for a couple of seconds can kill someone, but is not enough to trip a regular circuit breaker!
Wetness increases conductivity and therefore the risk of a dangerous electric shock, but a faulty appliance or damaged cable elsewhere exposing you to mains voltage can be life-threatening too!
So, why shouldn't we protect the entire house?
> I'm assuming [...] if there’s a short on any circuit power to the entire house is cut
Small nitpick: a GFCI/RCD doesn't trip because of a line-to-neutral short circuit, it only trips if some current "escapes" to somewhere else. Though it is true that nowadays we often install RCBOs which combine residual-current, overload, and short-circuit protection.
But your concern about nuisance trips is somewhat justified. If there is really only one RCD serving the entire house, which is very common for older installations, a ground fault will cause a larger outage.
Newer installations, however, typically use multiple RCBOs to reduce the blast radius. And really old installations, where small current leaks are more common, might not have an RCD anyway.
Also, in my experience, it's just not a problem in practice. I can count the number of nuisance RCD trips I've had in my life on one hand. And genuine faults are similarly rare. Other kinds of power outages are far more common.
> GFI outlets provide a very localized layer of safety [...] can be extraordinarily sensitive
I fully agree that this is an advantage.
A standard 30mA RCD or RCBO, as would be installed in Europe, should disconnect within 40ms at 150mA, but might take longer at lower currents. That could still be quite a substantial electrical shock. (I'm not qualified to say exactly how dangerous it still is, but I can attest to the fact that it can still hurt pretty bad even if the RCD trips.) A 5mA GFCI, as is typical in the US, provides a much larger safety margin. I guess nuisance trips would be a much bigger problem if the detection threshold for RCDs was lowered to 5mA.
So maybe we can agree that the perfect solution would be to have GFCI outlets everywhere? Because as it stands, you either have crude protection everywhere, or good protection limited to a few outlets.
One last note: Whether you have GFCI outlets or RCDs in your electrical panel, make sure to test them regularly via the test button! A faulty protection is no protection, and it's better to be safe than sorry.
Edit: One more thing worth keeping in mind is that, all else being equal, 230V drives almost twice the current as 120V, making the shock more dangerous and residual-current protection even more important.