Is there a benefit to living in a community property state?

That depends. If you are married to an exceedingly wealthy person and you do not work, you may be entitled to a bigger piece of the pie than if you lived in an equitable distribution state. A community property state also saves you the time, effort, and cost in deciding how the property is to be divided. Of course, you could argue over whether a particular piece of property in question is community property or not, and what its value is, but at least you won’t have to further subdivide it.

From the point of the view of the state, time and money is saved by not requiring judges and courts to be tied up litigating the division of community property.