Centroid of polygon stored in a Geographic Coordinate System

[DavidPike]

Following on from this thread Re: Creating multiple non-overlapping buffers - Esri Community

I've noticed that Centroid calculations for GCS features seem to be calculate as if the lat/lon coords were transcribed onto a cartesian plane i.e. Plate Carree and the Centroid calculated from that.

It all seems a bit off to me.  Am I missing something obvious?

[DanPatterson]

centroids are related to area as you probably already know (sometimes called center of mass)

There is no agreed upon method to calculate centroids, but a first step would be to use a projected coordinate system (area preserving is desired).  If you aren't working on a country, or other large area basis, I would use projected data unless you have another reason not to.