hence you need to query _all_ the nodes or can end up in a split-brain situation and lose consistency
I am not sure this is true. It is prohibitively expensive to read from all replicas. All you need to ensure is that any replica has the latest state. See how Azure Storage does it [0]. Another example is Spanner [1] that uses timestamps and not consensus for consistent reads.
[0] https://sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2011/current/2011-Casc... [1] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/whitepapers/life-of-re...