The fact that “query” and “ask” are synonyms in English does not make the patterns the same.
The key design goal in this thread was to create a pure functional core, which you can “ask” things of. That pattern is useful on both the command and query side of a CQRS system, and a different thing from splitting up mutating and reading operations as CQRS proposes
Maybe I misunderstand you though. Say you have a CQRS system that reads and writes to a database. Are you proposing the query side be implemented in pure side-effect-free functional code? How should the pure code make the network calls to the database?