Reproduce from mongo shell: 1 . db.getMongo().setReadPref( 'nearest' , [ { "something" : "x" , "region" : "a" } ]) 2 . db.getMongo().setReadPref( 'nearest' , [ { "something" : "x" , "region" : "a" }, { "something" : "x" } ]) db.getCollection( 'mytest' ).find({ _id: ObjectId( "my-object-id" ) }); Get expected results with 1. option. While using 2. setting, I can see that query is executed in random node matching second tag. Works as expected (as documentation says) with MongoDB version 4.2 but not starting with 4.4