I made an account to chime in. I think that expressive synths make distortion come to life in the synthesizer world.
As people are saying distortion is about dynamic range. Most synth patches will have robotically consistent amplitude for every note, which is why distortion feels static and not alive like it does on guitar.
On an expressive synth it feels like you’re touching the distortion. I like what @kamu0 said about paraphony too. When you squish two or more notes with continuous pitch and volume control into a distortion the wub wubs go haywire.
Here’s me playing Black Hole Sun on my Trautonium inspired synth with a smidge of distortion (I add more
at the end)
Here’s me improvising with an unreasonable amount of distortion