Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, Mongo is better than it's ever been. They even got through Jepsen just fine after wiredtiger. That said, it's pretty hard to make sense of when you would want non-relational dbms these days, especially in an era where you can get 100core systems in AWS/GCP. Write-scaling is still a pretty obvious reason, though things like Citus might help here.
They even got through Jepsen just fine after wiredtiger. With non-default settings[0]. The Jepsen tests passed with the "linearizable" read concern. The default read concern is "local", which "Provides no guarantee that the data has been written to a majority of the replica set members (i.e. may be rolled back)."[1] This is like having "READ UNCOMMITTED" be the default read level in a traditional database system. The…
Same goes for example for PostgreSQL [1], that uses Read Committed rather than Serializable transaction isolation by default because for the majority of the people, this is fine, and the performance tradeoffs are worth it.
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/transaction-iso.h...