[pron]

I'm not sure how you're getting this. In what way is Paxos a negative example? Raft, which is also a take on Paxos, was also formalised in TLA+ by its inventor, as were many other variations on Paxos; in fact, it is hard to derive any non-trivial distributed algorithm, based on Paxos or otherwise, without formalisation. This is true for most subtle algorithms, and distributed algorithms are prime examples of those. Algorithms that had not been formalised on inception, Chord being a famous example of one thought to have been "proven" correct without formalisation were often found to be incorrect once formalised [1]. Not to mention that that work won Lamport the Turing Award.

[1]: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2014/03/08/model-checking.html