I’m pretty sure it does give you read-availability, just not write availability?
I could be wrong but I think it’s: To serve a read from a replica in region X, where the write replica is in region Y s.t. there is a partition between X and Y, I’m pretty sure in the normal case X does not need to wait for Y to tell it to let the read go. Instead Y locks X on-write to implement consistency. So in the case of a partition X still does not wait for Y to execute a read, but writes become unavailable.
I could be wrong but I think it’s: To serve a read from a replica in region X, where the write replica is in region Y s.t. there is a partition between X and Y, I’m pretty sure in the normal case X does not need to wait for Y to tell it to let the read go. Instead Y locks X on-write to implement consistency. So in the case of a partition X still does not wait for Y to execute a read, but writes become unavailable.