This is a really neat and good article! I did a talk in Sweden the other month about how to build a distributed database, hopefully it may also be fun/useful/informative for others: https://youtu.be/5fCPRY-9hkc (it uses CRDTs instead, so is a counter-part that isn't totally ordered and isn't append-only).
I like the OP article though, cause I learned about NATS streaming, which I hadn't heard of before - just Kafka. Will have to check it out.