We have built massive multi-user systems with no sudo at all. Every users had the privileges required to do what was necessary.
To me, the most useless use of sudo is for admin access. When people creates nominative accounts, which are allowed to sudo everything. So people ssh to the system (via per-user account), then sudo su -, to do stuff.
Surely, it made sense before ssh keys where introduced (where there even such a time ?), because we had a single root password. A security-minded people would use auditd to link the whole process tree with a specific ssh private key, regardless of the user used.
