Currently the max view distance overwrite is locked to clients with Sodium, while Canvas is also perfectly capable of delivering excellent performance under high render distances. I'm currently playing in a default minecraft world with Canvas Renderer and have a large view up to the limit rendered while still pushing nearly 200 FPS on what I would call a mid-high end machine running on AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and an overclocked GTX 970.

I'd love to see the higher max render dist support other renderers than just sodium, especially Canvas for now. I believe just using the same config option to replace the maximum value for the vanilla render dist slider as well would be perfect with a warning on the tooltip to not change it if using the vanilla renderer to make it simple 😄