> Am I missing something?

I don’t think so, I think it is solved in the general sense. However what Spanner does is unique, and it does use synchronised clocks in order to do it.

However, Spanner does not solve the inter-continental acid database with high write throughput. So I don’t see it as ground breaking. CRDT’s are interesting, I’ve followed your work for a long time, but too constrained to solve this general problem I think.