I may be a bit of an old fart, but this is the exact reasoning behind my decision to never go with "distributed X" if there's a "single-machine X" where you can just vertically scale.

If you can afford 3-5 machines/VMs for a cluster you can almost certainly afford a single machine/VM with 2-4x the resources/CPU and chances are that it'll perform just as well (or better) because it doesn't have network latency to contend with.

Of course if you're around N >= 7 or N >= 9, then you should perhaps start considering "distributed X".

As long as your application is mostly built on very few assumptions about consistency it's usually pretty painless to actually go distributed.

Of course, there are legitimate cases where you want to go distributed even with N=3 or N=5, but IME they're very few and far between... but if your 3/5 machines are co-located then it's really likely that the "partitioning" problem is one of the scenarios where they actually all go down simultaneously or the availability goes to 0 because you can't actually reach any of the machines (which are likely to be on the 'same' network).