Spanner has a lot of tradeoffs too, I'm not sure what do you see as problematic in Cockroach, joins are good enough. The biggest tradeoffs are inherent to strongly consistent distributed systems. Even precise clocks and fast networks won't help as much as you might think. You still have to accept vastly different latencies and performance than in traditional single-node RDBMSs.
If I run several servers in the same rack, with a local private 10Gbps network, with CockroachDB, running on spinning HDDs, I expect to get the same (or better) throughput as with a single PGSQL instance, and a similar latency. (When accessing it from another server, via the public internet).
