Personally I'm pretty against bitcoin et all for their wastefulness (PoW) or lack of improvement on existing systems (PoS), but I can definitely see trusted timestamps as a valid use of a public ledger. Ironically, since git is implemented as a merkle tree, you could do this quite easily in git as a "blockchain" minus the Proof of *. So, no distributed trust, but I'm personally usually glad to trade a little bit of centralization for a whole lot of performance/efficiency.
We are on the same page. I do think there are some gains, although I question the use of "permissionless" blockchains (we have to remember to add this caveat now since we decided 90s tech should now be called "permissioned blockchains"). A simple published ledger ("immutable append-only", like CT logs) seems like a much easier route. If nodes care enough, they can poll it and alert when the tip changes in a way that should not be allowed.
