The point is that if you only look at the order of the data and not the wall-clock of some actor in the system, you can "calibrate" these separate ordering mechanisms together into a coherent whole and from that, you can build up all of the SQL guarantees.
Linearizability makes systems suffer because it tries to enforce a Newtonian model in a relativistic world. Order will naturally emerge faster when you're closer to the data than if you're farther. Measuring these with the same clock is what causes CAP, not some inherent property of distributed consistency.