[audioheavy]

Good article, although the title might be a bit too click-bate-y... there's plenty of research and available services that reliably can have low-latency, distributed writes at the highest data isolation levels (strict serializability). Both the Calvin and Spanner papers describe such systems.

The two papers mentioned in the post are highly insightful. This is one of my favorite subjects.

To fully disclose, I have a biased view on this given that I work for a (closed source) serverless, no-ops DB provider (Fauna) that implements a distributed transaction engine that is natively document-relational and doesn't compromise on relational (ACID, transactional) guarantees.