Probably, but what's the alternative?

I don't get the feeling they had an alternative (I don't either!), i suspect it was just commentary.

Yeah, it must be. I don't think there's a way to generically perform well on distributed queries, so this is probably as good as it gets.

Depends on the use case. There’s lots of ways that databases can can make trade offs on CAP. Unfortunately there’s not a single silver bullet.

You’ll make different choices for an application that’s processing clickstream data than one that’s managing highly relational data.

1. Run two beefy nodes and accept dataloss of unreplicated changes during failover.

2. Use eventual consistency (not suitable for every workload)