I don't think there is very much shortage of online tutorials and blogs showing how to create a basic Rails/Python/Node/whatever MVC monolith type web application backed by a RDBMS. Looking back at my career I can find plenty of valid use cases for needing to understand distributed computing for the most un-sexy of computing problems. One example was how to share a student's data in education software across school districts that each require hosting just their data in their own data centers. Another is making some boring CMS application highly available since you're customers are big paying Fortune 500s. Knowing this stuff helps IMO.