If you have to think about cross-shard transactions then you have to think about all the things on your first list too, as they are complexities related to transaction. I fail to see how that could possibly be simpler.
Cross-shard transactions are only a tiny fraction of transactions — if the complexities of dealing with that is constrained to some transactions instead of all of them, you're saving yourself a lot of headaches.
Actually, I'd argue a lot of apps can do entirely without cross-shard transactions! (eg. sharding by B2B orgs)
> But with B2B, we have accounts ranging from 100 users per organization to 200k users per organization.
You'd be surprised at how much traffic a single core (or machine) can handle — 200k users is absolutely within reach. At some point you'll need even more granular sharding (eg. per user within organization), but at that point, you would need sharding anyways (no matter your DB).