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The way you're defining "eventually consistent" seems to imply it means "the current state of the system is eventually consistent," which is not what I think that means. Rather, it means "for any given previous state of the system, the current state will eventually reflect that."

"Eventually consistent," as I understand it, always implies a lag, whereas the way you're using it seems to imply that at some point there is no lag.

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I was not trying to "define" eventually consistent, but to point out that people typically use the term quite loosely, for example when referring to the state of the system-of-systems of multiple microservices or event sourcing.

Those are never guaranteed to be in consistent state in the sense of C in ACID, which means it becomes the responsibility of the systems that use the data to handle the consistency. I see this often ignored, causing user interfaces to be flaky.

Inconsistent sounds so bad :)

I know. That is why it is useful way to think about it, because it both is true and makes you think.

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