[jdp]

That's the intuition behind systems like Flake (https://github.com/boundary/flake) and its predecessors.

In systems like Flake you are able to get a useful roughly-ordered property which is good for generating ID's and organizing things like activity feeds. Things will be mostly sorted by time by encoding the time in the most significant bits, but they will be fuzzy because of machine and sequence ID's in the LSB's. You will get monotonically increasing ID's per-process because each one spinlocks locally against backwards drift, but you're not guaranteed to get monotonically increasing ID's globally across all processes. One process' time might drift forward, or you might have two ID's at the same time but the instance with the higher machine ID responded first.