I seem to have misunderstood Spanner by and large. I thought their achilles heel was the atomic clock since it is this clock which makes consensus at scale possible and there by transactions. Cockroach and Yugabyte both work on similar principles but they use these hybrid logical clocks. The hybrid logical clock is a function of NTP and a monotonic local clock so I guess this works ok for Raft consensus.

https://www.yugabyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Distribu...

From Jepsen - "yugabyte seems mostly resilient to clock skews' - this is a very safe but at the same time a vague statement. What does mostly mean ? Good for 99% of practical use cases ?