Oh please don't confuse it with an aversion to formalism. It's quite the opposite. ACID, CAP and others were fantastic research when they came up. But now they are outdated and reductive of the real implications of running databases and distributed systems. That's why I mentioned PACELC being one of my favorite design principles in this matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACELC_design_principle

My criticism of this "Acronym Marketing" is that software engineers get stuck rallying behind acronyms as if they were timeless but to me ACID and CAP are outdated and it would be better if engineers really got into the consequences of running complex systems as you said, and not only repeating acronyms as if they covered the whole story.

OLAP vs OLTP have become marketing talkpoints from Databricks and friends to get people into paying for managed distributed systems when in reality for plenty of workloads Postgres runs just fine. People get stuck in the dichotomy without getting a further understanding of the underlying technology.

Nothing of this is confusing to me. Its reductive.