I think a lot of what you are mentioning comes down to the implementation of CQRS / ES being used not fundamental flaws in the approach. CQRS doesn't force you

I think a lot of what you are mentioning comes down to the implementation of CQRS / ES being used not fundamental flaws in the approach. CQRS doesn't force you to build a distributed system. It doesn't make you use eventual consistency or asynchrony but provides them as options. For example the system I worked on had synchronous command handling with a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous subscribers. This allowed us to use eventual consistency where it was appropriate and for all clients to be immediately aware of problems.