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is CA even possible in a distributed system though? I mean, it’s not like “the network never fails” is a design decision you’re allowed to make (short of removing the network altogether and therefore not being a distributed system at all)

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That's what Google spanner is claiming, that Spanner is Consistent and highly-Available (nine fives, or 99.99999% of the time available), which "in practice" they say is "CA".

From the perspective of the CAP theorem, Spanner is unquestionably a CP system, as the original paper [1] makes clear. (It relies on Paxos to elect leaders, and Paxos chooses consistency over availability.)

The "CA in practice" claims are purely marketing.

[1]: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

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