Okay, so a distributed cache like Redis or Memcached isn't always the best way to scale up your reads.

We often just go straight for distributed caches to scale apps that get a lot of reads, especially when one machine just ca'nt hold everything. It's kinda the go-to in a lot of architectural designs. But I wonder, are there times when adding all that complexity, like network delays, keeping things consistent, and the extra work to run it, actually makes things worse instead of better, even when the system is really busy? So, are there certain situations or ways we access data where another method might work better or be easier to handle than a whole distributed cache setup?