There is a difference between theoretical worst case and practical experience. Whether the direct-update experience or the event sourcing experience on this point is better depends on a lot of factors (many of which are dimensions of scale.) Neither is categorically ideal, you've got to understand the particular application.
Of course, when using an ACID RDBMS, you can also very trivially use a CQRS/event-sourcing approach for some flows with append-only event log tables and a separate process applying them to query tables that other clients only read and direct update for other flows.
> when using an ACID RDBMS, you can also very trivially use a CQRS/event-sourcing approach for some flows with append-only event log tables and a separate process applying them to query tables that other clients only read and direct update for other flows.
Sort of. You can't opt out of transactionality (transaction isolation settings are often global) and you can't defer index updates except by making your indices "manual".
The first job I worked for essentially built an event sourcing system on top of an RDBMS. We still had the production system brought down by an analyst leaving a transaction open for weeks (we weren't big enough to have a separate analytics datastore at that point). They should've known to enable autocommit (even though their queries were read only!), but it's still a footgun that was only there because of the ACID RDBMS.
Of course, when using an ACID RDBMS, you can also very trivially use a CQRS/event-sourcing approach for some flows with append-only event log tables and a separate process applying them to query tables that other clients only read and direct update for other flows.