Let's say you have events coming in that result in inserts, updates, and deletes on a table with a certain primary key. Assuming no dependencies external to this table, you only need events involving a specific key to be ordered. I.e. it doesn't really matter if row_a gets updated before or after row_b. In either case, you end up with the same thing. So if you do something like kafka partitions and you send events to certain partitions based on their primary key, then those partitions will be ordered which will be enough.

That doesn't fix your example of dealing with individual errors, but in many cases that's enough.