However, for building user-facing applications with CRDTs, their importance is unclear.
The question with CRDTs and local-first paradigms has always been the pressing need (or the lack thereof). The only one plausible 'need' that CRDTs serve is real-time collaboration and that too with a squinting eye.
Real-time collaboration support translates, in practice, to text-editing and picture-editing collaboration. Google docs and the ilk have solved that problem (using central solutions). A CRDT-inspired central-solution like Figma is inspiring, and maybe that's the only place CRDTs fit in their survival quest when combating against central-solutions.
The rest of the claimed advantages seem to not withstand the test of times. This articles talks about 7 features of CRDTs [1].
Fast: Things are already fast with central solutions.
Multi-device: There is multi-device support with almost all solutions (if you decouple the real-time collaboration aspect).
Offline: It's rare, at least in first world countries, to be in a need for offline access (except maybe in airplanes).
Longevity: As can be seen from another comment here, longevity is actually a problem with CRDTs because data model updates are not easy.
Privacy: With BYOK encryption pattern, privacy is not as much an issue.
User control: Even with CRDTs, user is not in control of their data - other peers can mess with your data.