Thanks. I added a parenthetical remark to the post to indicate that I was talking about DynamoDB's default settings.
It's left as a very simple task for developers leveraging DynamoDB to make the appropriate trade offs on consistent or inconsistent read.
source: Used to work for AWS on a service that heavily leveraged DynamoDB. Not _once_ did we experience any problems with consistency or reliability, despite them and us going through numerous network partitions in that time. The only major issue came towards the end of my time there when DynamoDB had that complete service collapse for several hours.
On the sheer scale that DynamoDB operates at, it's more likely to be a question of "How many did we automatically handle this week?" than "How often do we have to deal with network partitions?"
"GetItem provides an eventually consistent read by default."
This seems to meet the definition of "DynamoDB's default settings"
[0] - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/APIReferen...
It would be better to state that both eventually consistent and fully consistent reads are available, and consistency can be enforced up front via configuration.