Of course APIs that serve as synchronous endpoints to distributed systems are a leaky abstraction. But its not the only one of its kind, there's also Guaranteed Message Delivery [1].
I find the philosophy behind Akka in this context a better fit - embrace that networks are unreliable and build your app around this limitation accordingly [2]. The cost is that it results in more work for the developer just like with the usage of CRDTs.
Reminds of the way LMAX achieve high throughput and low latency on their trading exchange. One of the key points is that they use parallelism but not concurrency. Keep your threads busy doing one thing only and avoid synchronising with other threads. No blocking, no queues and they achieve >100K messages/s.
Where they do need pass messages between threads they use the famous LMAX Disruptor which keeps data copying and blocking to a minimum.
That's just the first thought that I had while watching it. Off-topic, you say? true, but so is the story. Don't mean to be insensitive to the people who were affected.