>Startups do need high availability.

HA is important. But Postgres and MySQL both support HA and replication setups without needing to jump straight into a distributed SQL (In this context of using cockroach). We use MySQL Innodb cluster + MySQL router with auto failover on single primary mode.

> If you start having replicas you are already in distributed territory.

But it’s not the same as a distributed database with quorum writes, global consensus, and cross-region latencies. Those systems are built for horizontal write scaling, that come with added complexity and cost, which most apps don’t need.

It's much more simple to have a single master multi replica setup than a multi master one