This post by Marc Brooker on (meta-)stability might be a fun and explanatory read: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2021/05/24/metastable.html

Murat is also an amazing writer and distsys researcher, so basically anything he writes about I find interesting.

Oh, very interesting. I've ran into problems like this in queuing systems and had no idea that this is what they were called.

Going in and just dumping the queues can solve it, but can be tricky depending on the complexity of the system.