[tschottdorf]

employee here.

Yep, we've also had our share of troubles with noisy clock on cloud environments, so that's something we're very aware of. Further down the road, we're considering a "clockless" mode, which of course isn't clockless, but depends less on the offset threshold: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/14093

That said, even today, configuring a cluster with a fairly high maximum clock offset is feasible for many workloads.