It not clear at to me what you are actually advocating for. The article is pretty clear that most people should choose a CP database over an AP database. This i

It not clear at to me what you are actually advocating for. The article is pretty clear that most people should choose a CP database over an AP database. This is true regardless of your scale unless you don't care about consistency at all. A start up does not need to make a CP system highly available but they will likely need consistency. They can probably make eventually consistency work for them but it does take effort and money. I don't see many cases were AP is the right choice. Again CRDT are good but you need to design carefully to make sure you system can work with eventually consistency. Once you have done that you are only gaining availability during partitions which does not increase your up time much. I would recommend a standalone database, a stock CP database, or renting spanner over an AP if time and money is a concern.