Some systems (like Cassandra) has upserts and can do writes without reading. Though you loose any kind of "transaction" safety in that you are not sure what you are writing on top of. But in my experience for the vast majority of cases that is ok.
That forces the latest-version resolution into a read-side problem - systems like that cannot handle any sort of complete table-scans but can only really work for a pre-known key.
With a known unique key, this is somewhat possible to use systems like this, but extremely expensive when what you need is BETWEEN '2017-01-01' and '2017-01-02'.
With Cassandra (well most nosql dbs that I've run into) you model your data in the db by the queries. So if you want to scan by date then you create a new table (or a materialized view) with the date as the key you query for. Though even for then you have to keep in mind the amount of data to make sure you don't have too much data per partition and hotspots.
If you use a clustering key, scans become trivial within a given partition.