If you instead implement low-latency systems where each step along a dataflow involves a round-trip through replicated highly available storage, Spanner if you like or even just Kafka, then 100% you might reasonably conclude that eventual consistency is the right call. This is roughly the situation that microservice implementors currently find themselves in. I don't think it is a great situation to be in, personally.
The value proposition with something like Materialize (and there are other options) is that you can get consistency and performance if you can express your computation as something more structured than imperative code that writes to and reads from storage. In our case, the "something" is SQL.
Hope that helps!
