[withinboredom]

You _can_ use them, but even that won't save you. If you take a distributed lock, and crash, you still have the same issue. What I wrote is essentially a distributed transaction and what happens in a distributed transaction with "read uncommitted" isolation levels. A database that supports this handles all the potential failure cases for you. However, that doesn't magically make the errors disappear or may not be even fully/properly handled (e.g., a node running out of disk space in the middle of the transaction) by your code/database. It isn't naive, it is literally a pseudo-code of what you are proposing.