[WJW]

It's more of a design compromise than an outright flaw though. Since you can't know if your order to shut down a pod has arrived or not in a distributed system (per the CAP theorem), you either have to do it the way k8s has already implemented it or you have to accept potentially unbounded wait pod shutdown (and by extension new release rollout) durations in times of network partitions. K8s just chose Availability over Consistency in this case.

You can argue whether it would not have been preferable to choose C over A instead (or even better, to make this configurable), but in a distributed system you will always have to trade one of these two off. The hacks with shared emptyDir volumes just moves the system back to "Consistency" mode but in a hacky way.