To improve the performance of their distributed systems by imposing stronger assumptions than full asynchronicity on their environment, I expect. (See also Google’s Spanner.)
Sure, I didn’t intend to make any deep point here; I don’t think I have any deep points to make in this particular area, honestly :) I just wanted to drop a set of easily searchable terms for motivation that might not have been made explicit in your writeup (probably because it’s quite tangential to it—metrology and distributed systems are both fascinating but don’t really share a lot of ideas).