[jamwt]

Article author here.

It's not new "in the world", but often new to our users, who understand it less intuitively than pessimistic locking.

Unless they're using Haskell or probably other very exotic environments with strict understanding of mutability and so on, they know Mutexes but not STM or other OCC patterns. So we lean heavily on explaining it. Not because it is original, but because it is unfamiliar.