I don't quite understand what's going on then because I swear I just read in one of those threads last week that even the best text automerger still needs manual intervention to avoid creating nonsense...which, to be honest, sounded off because I thought this whole thing was popularized by Google Docs? Wave? and it didn't have that issue
Can you link the other comment? Its hard to know what you're talking about without that context.
In any case, you can't use a text "automerger" to collaboratively edit JSON text. (Whats an "automerger"?)
To understand why, suppose we had an empty (JSON) list: []. Two users concurrently inserted two items, "a" and "b". If those inserts get translated into string inserts, you end up with a JSON string containing ["a""b"] - which is a syntax error!
The trick to making this work correctly is that the CRDT / OT system needs to understand that you're editing a list. Don't collaboratively edit the JSON string. Collaboratively edit a list then JSON.stringify the result.
> the best text automerger still needs manual intervention to avoid creating nonsense
AFAIK the best production-ready CRDT solution for text is Yjs [0], and in some specific cases, the result of the merge might be something unexpected (one example [1]). However, there is research-quality CRDT called Peritext [2] which is specifically designed to handle styled text in an intuitive way, so the merge is more predictable.
