Absolutely. I use CQRS fairly regularly, but I've never used ES on production software and I can't think of a case where it would have been appropriate. It's a serious solution that is not trivial to implement.

CQRS is a highly understandable, almost always reasonable technique to follow when you strip away all the other things that people tend to associate it with.

This is a pretty decent article on that: https://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2012/08/22/busting-some-c...

I like thinking about applications in terms of read-side and write-side. I'm not super enamored with async CQRS, but I am a huge fan of APIs and data models where the developers realized that how I consume the data is wildly different than how I update it.

Oh yeah, us too. We use CQRS on nearly all projects we do these days. But event sourcing, totally different animal.