I'm constantly impressed by the design of DOs. I think it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction that something is wrong with doing it this way, but in reality I think this is exactly how a lot of real products are implicitly structured: a lot of complex work done at very low scale per atomic thing (by which I mean, anything that needs to be transactionally consistent).
In retrospect what we ended up building at Framer for projects with multiplayer support where edits are replicated at 60 FPS while being correctly ordered for all clients is a more applied version of what DOs are doing now. We also ended up with something like a WAL of JSON object edits so in case a project instance crashed its backup could pick up as if nothing had happened, even if committing the JSON patches into the (huge) project data object didn't have time to occur (on an every-N-updates/M-seconds basis just like described here).
In retrospect what we ended up building at Framer for projects with multiplayer support where edits are replicated at 60 FPS while being correctly ordered for all clients is a more applied version of what DOs are doing now. We also ended up with something like a WAL of JSON object edits so in case a project instance crashed its backup could pick up as if nothing had happened, even if committing the JSON patches into the (huge) project data object didn't have time to occur (on an every-N-updates/M-seconds basis just like described here).