If either of these things happened there would be enough other turmoil that having a few constipated databases would not seem too bad. The view that this line of discussion leads to is that centralised solutions are best where they are practicable. It is considerably easier to keep copies of information consistent when the number of them is one. It is easier to handle transactional integrity when all the data are in one place. It is easier to provide backup, hot standby, and so forth when it is known where the authoritative data is.
Similar considerations apply to network management.
The pioneers of internetworking took it as an article of faith that requiring any kind of Galactic Central was evil, and they were of course quite right. However, having central management of reasonably sized units can be much easier than extremes of distribution. A matter that often comes up in this context is reliability and robustness. It is said that distributed systems are more reliable because their components do not all fail at once. After all, as said earlier, using distributed techniques increases the chance that something will go wrong.