I had a sad incident where I had committed changes but not pushed, and then I accidentally spilled a drink on my computer and bricked it. Even though this is unlikely to happen again because I won’t bring open containers like mugs or bowls of soup around computers anymore (water bottles are fine), and it was only three hours of work lost, because of this incident I do not feel I have saved until I have pushed. “What if you brick your computer again, huh, where’s all that progress now?”

But overall I agree about decoupling saving changes from actually publishing them!