What consistency does this feature need?
Answer questions about the system — what it must guarantee, what can fail, what each node can know — never about a product. You arrive at a primitive together with the guarantee it actually offers, the guarantees it refuses, the trade-offs you are buying, how it fails in production, and the simpler thing to weigh first.
Consistency is chosen per feature, not per system — a product almost always contains features with genuinely different requirements, and paying for linearizability across all of them is the most common form of over-engineering in this field. Start from what a user would notice, not from what sounds safest.
If a reader sees data a few seconds out of date, what actually goes wrong?
How to answer honestly · Describe the harm concretely, in the product. "It would be inconsistent" is restating the premise. "A user could withdraw twice" or "a follower count is briefly low" are answers you can design against — and they have very different costs.