[jolynch]

Great points, transactions are certainly useful in helping developers think about state transitions. I think some of the ~snark might come from my personal struggles with trying to convey why wrapping non idempotent state transitions in "BEGIN TRANSACTION ... COMMIT" doesn't immediately make the system reliable. I completely agree transactions make understanding the state transitions easier and that is valuable.

I do think CRDTs or idempotency/fencing tokens are also a valuable way to reason about state transitions, and they can provide much lower latency in a global distributed system.