The fact that you're not even noticing the federation shows how effective it is ;)
You're probably browsing communities that aren't on Lemmy.world often without realising, I'm here replying to you from wetdry.world (a mastodon instance), and the OP also doesn't come from Lemmy.world
The cool thing about this is that no single server, company, or entity in general gets to decide over the wider fediverse, because everything is spread out and shared between thousands of independent servers. This is completely opposite to what traditional social media services have built.
@unterzicht that IS it's use. It is primarily used in show-off posts where people present their systems so that people in the replies can get a quick glance on what they're running.
The reason this is big news is because
neofetch
was by far the biggest project of it's kind