That's exactly what happened. Initially DC was the only option because Mr. Edison personally bankrolled the first electric grids which required building power plants per section of the grid. Additionally, DC was replacing engine based industrialized factories, which indeed had on premise steam or coal engines, and so installing a power plant for just that factory would have made perfect sense. At the time particular time, granted very soon after, AC was not viable. Saying "not at all" is a bit global of a statement considering it contradicts history.
Ok, granted, compared to on-premise steam or coal engines or waterwheels, Edison's crappy DC was viable.
AC wasn't viable at that time because it hadn't been invented and deployed yet. It wasn't intuitively obvious and it took a brilliant Serbian electrical engineer to invent it (or rather, the machines to implement it; AC was theorized before Tesla) before it became viable.
However, as a competitor to AC power systems spanning whole cities and interconnected in a nationwide grid, DC wasn't even remotely viable.
How can something be compared as a competitor to spmething else that hasn't even been invented yet? It's difficult arguing the point when you keep regressing back to historically impossible what-ifs.
