That is incorrect but a common misconception (I used to believe the same). Try using it and you'll see the generated code is slower for stores on x86: https://godbolt.org/z/KrzT9bTKf

I agree with GP - the commonly given "always use sequentially consistent" advice is not really good advice. It should be "use a mutex wherever possible", but once you decide that's not performant enough, you probably often do want acq/rel or relaxed. I've actually found seq_cst to be quite rare.

In addition to what dataflow already said: while something might look free because you don't need to emit any kind of special instruction to get the desired result, doesn't mean that it's free in hardware. The reason why a lot of CPU architectures have weaker memory ordering is because this is faster on a hardware level. Consider that for sequential consistency to work on a multithreaded system, caches of all cores must be kept in sync. This is hidden from you, but does result in higher latencies and more power usage.