Technology

Basically any distributed ledger would actually perform better, be more secure, and be easier to use as a centralized database.

Performance is relative to what your goals are (extremely high transaction volume isn't always something you need to handle, and also isn't guaranteed to be impossible with a DLT either), and centralized databases / services aren't always the best fit for every problem. Regarding security, well, I really don't see how you came to that conclusion. Guess it depends on what exactly you mean with security?

Real estate is pretty commonly seen as the prime example of a field where a DLT is a better fit than a more "traditional" centralized service. As an example let's say we want a system that could be used to record changes in property ownership, so you need auditable state changes and an immutable history, and you want some sort of guarantees that generally someone who's not authorized to do something to a property isn't going to be able to do it by just issuing a state change (ie writing to the DB.) Your stakeholders are probably going to be the local government, licensed real estate brokers (if that's a thing in your jurisdiction), possibly all private property owners who want to sell their property etc. etc. You absolutely could build this with a "traditional" centralized service that eg. the GOBERMENT (or whoever trusted stakeholder) runs and operates, but then you have a single bottleneck that's entirely dependent on a single stakeholder, and you still need to implement eg. audit trails for state mutations, access control, etc. etc. As I said it's absolutely doable, but many of the things you'd do to build it are essentially just reinventing some sort of DLT but in a monolithic package and without any of the benefits. Take state immutability for example; you'd probably be building some sort of hash tree or chain anyhow but now you have to do both the hashing and the verification and validation manually instead of the infrastructure doing it for you, and it's nontrivial to do right so the attack surface here is not going to be small in a home-grown solution. You'll probably want to require that all state changes (transactions) are signed by a known trusted actor, so you'll need to build that too, so here's yet more attack surface. Also you probably don't want to run literally just a single instance of your database so you're going to want some sort of replication, which may need some legwork depending on the database system used. Compare this (non-exhaustive) list to what your average DLT framework like Hyperledger guarantees "out of the box", where the infrastructure itself gives you guarantees about the immutability of history and who is allowed to make state changes to which parts of the state (in our fictional case you'd want a Proof of Authority consensus mechanism, so anyone making state changes would have to have a valid X.509 cert issued by some trusted CA, but with public reads as property ownership is a matter of public record), which is by default distributed so there's no single point of failure, and is eventually consistent within known parameters and known behavior.

Distributed systems definitely do require more skill to operate so the benefits need to outweigh the costs (and they often do, which is why we eg. tend to use microservices for high volume systems), but I honestly fail to see how for example a project using Hyperledger tools (and there's more than just the DLT Fabric), which are specifically built around privacy and security, would automatically be less secure than a centralized system where you have to build the same features yourself, meaning you just have to trust that you did everything right.