This isn't anything against Redpanda, but I'm always amazed how badly all these distributed databases do in Jepsen. What would one use them for in practice, which wouldn't be better suitable by a (the thing I've used), say postgresql and streaming replication in case the server goes down? (I'm not suggesting there isn't a good application, just I'm not knowledgeable enough to know of one).
Once you have a distributed database, they often have a myriad of tuning parameters that all impact in which corner of the CAP triangle you want to be. Using this you have to choose what risks you are willing to accept. If all my replicas are all in the same rack, any timeout-issues found would often just be academical and I can pragmatically design such a system very differently, vs if they are in different parts of the globe.
I might also have such high influx of low value data that I can accept some losses, the cost of a total deadlock would be more than just one transaction lost in cyberspace, not everyone is building a bank. That said, it still sucks a lot to have inconsistent data regardless of your application, so in such cases aim for lost data rather than wrong data. So in theory, the distributed approach is consider wrong, but in practice it might just be good enough.
This also ties into how you model your data, a lot of the faults found in the latest mongodb analysis was around multi-document transactions, but nobody uses mongodb this way, mostly it’s just a place where you dump standalone documents into it.
In the end, you have to go back to original question of why you are choosing a distributed DB in the first place, is it for scale, HA, regionality or other reasons. Then design around that, it’s never a silver bullet fix all solution.
Taking your example of streaming replication. How would that behave if primary acked to the client and then crashed, before the replica received the transaction? The alternative of waiting for the replica before you ack instead gives you 2 sources of failure. You’ve now reinvented a distributed system and are now in the same soup as all these other databases, just with other tradeoffs. :)