I've spent a lot of time studying CRDTs & order theory in the last year & will publish an article too. Local-first apps are not easy to build, complex data structures (say, calendar repetitions with exceptions) become harder to model. Everything must converge automatically while clients can branch off.

In general, you don't really get to compact tombstones meaningfully without consensus so you really are pushing at least remnants of the entire log around to each client indefinitely. You also can't easily upgrade your db you're stuck looking after legacy data structures indefinitely - or you have to impose arbitrary cut off points.

List CRDTs - which text CRDTs are built from are probably unavoidable except for really really simple applications. Over the last 15 years they have evolved, roughly: WOOT (paper) -> RGA (paper) -> YATA (paper) / YJS (js + later rust port) -> Peritext (paper) / Automerge (rust/js/swift) -> Loro (Rust/js). Cola (rust) is another recent one. The big libs (yjs, automerge, loro) offer full doc models.

Mostly the later ones improve on space, time & intent capture (not interleaving concurrent requests).

The same few guys (Martin Kleppman, Kevin Jahns, Joseph Gentle, probably others) pop up all over the more recent optimisations.