I didn't mean to imply that you could. But the simplicity that consistent distributed transactions can deliver in principle can easily get drowned out by accide

I didn't mean to imply that you could. But the simplicity that consistent distributed transactions can deliver in principle can easily get drowned out by accidential complexity created by a specific implementation. For instance, you have to get all participants in a distributed transaction to support the same standard protocol without too much bridging, wrapping, special interface description languages, tons of configuration metadata, etc. You have to agree on a small stable set of features that everyone implements in a robust way. But the major corporate sponsors of the competing approaches originating in the 1990s and early 2000s got disrupted before any one of them could gain enough traction to bludgeon everyone else into compliance. My point was merely that almost no one in the 1990s doubted the necessity of consistent transactions. Eventual consistency and all the rest only became popular with NoSQL and the general desire to imitate internet giants that didn't even exist in the 1990s.