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I have this problem in the system I work on - the short nuance-less answer from my experience is that, once your scale gets large enough, you can't prevent ordering issues entirely and you have to build the resilience into the architecture and the framing of the problem. You often end up paying for consistency with latency.

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I think you may be talking past each other. In the approach taken in the article and the parent comment, if the event sequence number allocation of the writer races the reader cursor position in the wrong way, events will NEVER BE DELIVERED.

So it is a much more serious issue at stake here than event ordering/consistency.

As it happens, if you use event log tables in SQL "the Kafka way" you actually get guarantee on event ordering too as a side effect, but that is not the primary goal.