The best UX resolution to this kind of issue I have seen is to display “This table cell was added by Bob concurrently to Alice removing its row. How would you like to proceed: recover the row or ignore the change?”
But if it does happen, either they get a new popup, eventually, saying that their conflict-resolution decisions also conflicted and what would they like to do, or the system decays to a CRDT-style pre-determined resolution rule for the second-order conflict -- with similar problems to the original CRDT resolution rule we tried to avoid. Things like "give priority to the person who chose to keep information instead of deleting", "give priority to the person with the biggest random number", "merge them by keeping information along with a note in the document about the attempt to delete the column", or "delete the column and put the edited cell in a note". But this time, only when the users conflict after the first popup, so it doesn't occur as often.
I think you're describing a metastability effect which occurs in all distributed systems that don't use pre-determined resolution rules like pure CRDTs. It happens in network protocols, distributed transactions, and consensus protocols in general. If the process you use to resolve depends on input from multiple parties who don't have a way to communicate and could choose conflicting values, there's a non-zero probability of needing another round or to escalate upwards to a higher-level system to resolve.
In many technical systems, provided there's a way to communicate it's not difficult to make the probability of repeated rounds or escalations tend arbitrarily close to zero (but not actually zero). If there's a possibility of network partition, though, the conflict can come back later when communication returns; there's no way to completely make it go away.
Git marks conflicts when merging. CRDTs could do the same, but I don't know any which have implemented this stuff yet.
Context - a lot of the literature is about the backend algorithm. But that still leaves individual teams tripping over the frontend interaction design and usability.
Example of what I'm looking for - hex.tech has a video tutorial of their "Cell locking" feature, where the cell gets disabled and a "Mac Lockard has taken control of a cell you were editing" toast notification appears. [1]. This is fully baked and a recipe which if I put in a jira ticket could actually get implemented. :)
I would love to read a book which is a "Don't make me think" and has an example with "This table cell was added by Bob concurrently to Alice removing its row. How would you like to proceed: recover the row or ignore the change?". All the UI's in my head would look like "Clippy" from MS Word - or "Pipey" from Silicon Valley [2], haha.
1: https://hex.tech/blog/a-pragmatic-approach-to-live-collabora...
...but my general belief is that UI patterns need to evolve as (1) specific UIs before they become (2) general patterns, and we simply don't have enough good solutions yet to make a pattern library out of them.