The story seems to repeat itself for distributed database: Documentation looks more like advertisement. Promises a lot but contains multiple errors, and failures that can corrupt the data. It's great that jepsen doing the work they do!
There wasn't much reaction on the mailing list to the lost-write problem back in January, or to the Jira tickets. I actually tried calling MariaDB on the phone to see if they'd like to talk about it, but no dice. I assume they're probably busy with other projects at the moment (hi, it's me too) and haven't had a chance to switch gears.
Not necessarily; before Kyle started this one-man crusade against data loss, database vendors would claim generally whatever and it would go unchallenged for decades. (You might get the occasional bug report, which you could handwave away as “hardware” or “you're holding it wrong” or just ignore it.) Now you're _slightly_ less likely to succeed, but only as long as e.g. your product is sufficiently uninteresting or hard enough to set up that he doesn't test it. :-)