Kudos to the raft authors for making distributed consensus accessible. Structuring the presentation in terms of RPCs and making the algorithm well-suited for implementing replicated state machines may not sound like a big deal, but those decisions really helped to make it approachable.

In a span of a decade consensus transformed from an esoteric algorithm that you can maaaaybe try implementing if you are a google engineer, to being widely deployed across many storage systems and readily accessible libraries and Raft played a big part in it.