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The whole point of the problem is that you're not allowed to use timeouts and stuff to get a work around. Adding timeouts etc fundamentally changes the situation. The distributed systems on the Internet you see do not solve the problem - they work around it, basically by adding failure modes not present in the original.

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I think I'm being more pragmatic and immediately jumping to what needs to change to make this situation treatable. An abstract statement of a problem like this is probably great for teaching people concepts about consensus, but hopefully no one knowingly designs stuff that way (except Mongo perhaps)

If you don't understand what's impossible, you run the risk of trying for something you'll never be able to accomplish. You'll never know why you don't succeed. It's precisely about teaching and learning the limits beyond which it's pointless to even try to go.

If it's pragmatic to dismiss impossibility results, perhaps revisit pragmatism.

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