I have actually seen this done. It was extremely underwhelming and provided no tangible benefits versus just having an executable .jar file instead. The filesize difference was negligible and being able to update Tomcat versions separately wasn't all that useful. In the end, the project was migrated over to running as a .jar instead.

Then again, i've also seen projects where Jetty is used locally and .war with Tomcat is used when deployed, which was an inconsistent mess.

Overall, Tomcat is pretty cool but the ease of use with Spring Boot running Tomcat or anything else in embedded mode is really nice.