Yes and no. The main idea of a dvcs is that you could send patches and pull requests to other people's forks. So in principle there is technically no blessed repository, but that doesn't mean there isn't a blessed repository from a social perspective.
(Also, there is more than one "blessed" Linux repo that a lot of people use. There's linux-rt, linux-stable, etc.)
I don't think this is true. It was developed by Torvalds to maintain the Linux kernel, which has always had a "blessed" repository at kernel.org.