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As these locks automatically expire, it seems scary to me that losing network connectivity for >TTL can break mutual exclusion guarantees.

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Unfortunately, you do need _some_ sort of TTL because there is no way for the lockable server to know when a remote process has simply died.

However, TTLs can be set to be arbitrarily long (e.g. multiple days), which means, in practice, you can avoid losing locks due to networking issues.

You can instead have manual overrides. Not seeing a lock means that at least a person has decided it's safe to run Vs something simply have taken too long to respond.

If TTLs can be arbitrary lengths, wouldn't setting them to high values (a week, month, year, whatever) allow you to implement whatever manual override mechanism you wanted?

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