[groggo]

A good point. Certainly for raster analysis it doesn't make sense.

But any type of vector data could be modeled on a sphere, right? Points, shapes, lines. And I saw "better" because even the best suited projection will have some small amount of distortion.

Either way, most things use planer geometry so projections are necessary, and you need to have some understanding of how all that works

[jofer]

You can model polygons on a sphere, but the issue is that the data you're starting with is already in a cartesian representation. You actually can't easily convert between the two for complex geometries in cases where they cross the antimeridian/poles. So trying to do anything other than points is difficult in practice, unless you're natively generating data from scratch in a spherical representation, which is rate.