I would say the author just tried to redefined "distributed", and ignored those real distributed systems, e.g. Paxos/Raft-based ones.
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You are thinking of fully decentralised systems.
A system where there is a centralised leader is still a distributed system so long as at least some of the processing takes place on other nodes.
As per Wikipedia, a distributed system is: "a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system."
You're describing consensus algorithms.