Most “NewSQL” databases are designed for OLTP use cases (i.e. many small queries that do little aggregation). Data Lakes are optimized for OLAP (i.e. doing a smaller amount of queries, but aggregating over large amounts of data).

As an example, Athena would do a terrible job at finding a specific user by its ID, while Spanner would behave just as poorly at calculating the cumulative sales of all products for a given category, grouped by store location (assuming many millions of rows representing sales).

Hope this analogy makes sense.