What you describe is very normal in telecom and has been for a long time. 4G, 5G, etc are all totally dependent on every device syncing to the one higher up in the chain. These days typically a digital control loop is used to tune a high frequency voltage-controlled oscillator which feeds a counter. An event (like GPS PPS, or an ethernet frame arriving on the cable) is extracted from the signal and the counter generates a timestamp. The chips to do this are incredibly cheap and the performance is hard to comprehend.

https://www.ti.com/product-category/clocks-timing/clock-netw...