But it wouldn't, because the surrounding infrastructure would be guaranteeing that. My point is that distributed systems engineers are assuming too few things about the hardware and OS. A much wider space of distributed algorithms become useful if you have full control over your stack.
Do you think NASA quibbles about how to make a perfect consensus bit-coding algorithm between the fault-tolerant processors of a mars probe? No; they just use hardware+firmware that provides a hard real-time platform, allowing the algorithm itself to be simple.
It doesn't require a VM pause to cause a system freeze, an SMI interrupt can do that as well.
It doesn't take a lot to have backwards time travel, NTP can do that for you as well in some bad configurations.
It's very hard to rely on time in a distributed system. If you want a simple algorithm just don't rely on time at all, use it for logs so a human can correlate things when debugging an issue but don't assume time will flow at the same rate for all systems. Do use a monotonic clock always for internal timers, time does move backwards in systems.
Do you think NASA quibbles about how to make a perfect consensus bit-coding algorithm between the fault-tolerant processors of a mars probe? No; they just use hardware+firmware that provides a hard real-time platform, allowing the algorithm itself to be simple.