Worth noting, not quite "everyone" does this. Cassandra uses "leaderless" (single decree) paxos, which has some advantages and some disadvantages (for instance, 1RT WAN reads from any region).
I agree with you that Paxos is simpler than Raft. The problem with Paxos IMO is that Lamport's original paper is impenetrable; lots of later writing is easier to understand, including those that describe more complex protocols. The intuitions are actually pretty straightforward, and transfer to all of the extensions to Paxos (which are not as straightforwardly compatible with Raft).
Raft may have helped more people get comfortable with distributed consensus, and sped its adoption, but being a sort of dangling branch of the tech tree I wonder if this may have stalled progress beyond it.
I agree with you that Paxos is simpler than Raft. The problem with Paxos IMO is that Lamport's original paper is impenetrable; lots of later writing is easier to understand, including those that describe more complex protocols. The intuitions are actually pretty straightforward, and transfer to all of the extensions to Paxos (which are not as straightforwardly compatible with Raft).
Raft may have helped more people get comfortable with distributed consensus, and sped its adoption, but being a sort of dangling branch of the tech tree I wonder if this may have stalled progress beyond it.