The post touches on the underlying problem. Distributed stuff is fundamentally very difficult. As Jepson has shown so definitively, getting these protocols righ

The post touches on the underlying problem. Distributed stuff is fundamentally very difficult. As Jepson has shown so definitively, getting these protocols right is very unlikely even for very experienced developers. Small changes can destroy correctness, or influence the assumed consistency / isolation level in surprising ways. The NoSQL fad embraced one extreme: the simplicity and performance of Eventual Consistency, essentially pushing any complexity that creates onto the application. At the other extreme, the Spanner paper explicitly argues for prioritizing correctness first, using a conservative transaction design more straightforward to implement and use, at the cost of potentially much worse performance under high contention. Both approaches have merits, but I think it's clear they aren't one size fits all solutions. Or even fits most. Hence the explosion in systems trying to find some balance between these extremes. With time the picture should resolve. The early days of rdbms's went through a similar explosion then consolidation down to the most effective algorithms.