I find it fascinating when different people independently arrive at the same architecture when working on a hard problem like this. In my company we built our offline-first apps with PowerSync, which has the same idea of optimistic local changes while waiting for the central server to acknowledge the definitive changes. In PowerSync's case, the sync engine reads Postgres replication logs directly.

Yeah, I'm surprised this pattern doesn't have a more general name.

I've also used it to synchronize content for local multi-window editing applications: each window is its own process but routes through one "coordination" process to ensure consistent ordering.

Easily solves some cross-process concurrency issues.