What irony?

To me, this isn't irony at all. It shows that google can't defeat the algorithmic complexity of things like consensus and shared state editing, and so gracefully degrades functionality.

That shows a very good understanding of scaling - realizing any solution you choose has limits and tradeoffs, and thinking about and handling those limit cases sanely ahead-of-time, rather than waiting for it to fall over and hoping for the best.

I think it has more to do with preventing concurrent writes stepping on each other. Google Docs must be the number one example of real-world systems doing Operational Transformation [1]. It's not like HN is bring down Google's servers.

Incidentally OT is another example of the value of in-sync clocks, for those asking about that elsewhere in this thread.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation