[thanatos_dem]

That's the problem... There's not a ton of nuance in CAP. CAP has a formal definition and a system is provably at most CP or AP. Other terms that people often associate with CAP is where the nuance comes in. The reality of the matter is that systems claim to be CP or AP, but most have assumptions or bugs that violate it, so in the end, most systems are just P.

Stale reads technically violate the definition of Consistent in CAP. Using raft means unavailability of some subset of nodes can make the entire system unavailable, violating the definition of Availability in CAP.

So the parent comment's suggestion of serving reads from any replica would result in only a partition tolerant system, without any formal availability or consistency guarantees.