> Spanner runs consensus for each key range and does not need all nodes to be available to make progress also my understanding since again it has a leader for each key range writes scale better.
Spanner uses Paxos (consensus) for replication within a key range (shard), but two-phase commit across shards: https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub39966
Citus relies on PostgreSQL's streaming replication, which gives higher throughput than Paxos, but Paxos has better availability characteristics. On the other hand, Paxos with leader leases as used by Spanner is similar to streaming replication both in terms of performance characteristics and short downtime during failover.