Attempting to balance strong consistency models with low concurrency control overhead is a very important line of research because as systems grow larger our current concurrency control schemes have overheads which are often prohibitively high, but some reduced-consistency schemes make things difficult to reason about for application programmers and result in complex handling logic. Any work to bridge this gap is certainly solving a meaningful problem.
The main idea is to use CRDTs, commutative replicated data types, on which all operations commute, to allow for the construction of data structures without communication: if all operations can be applied in any order, just apply it locally and them disseminate the operation, since eventually it will reach all replicas and we don't mind if it was applied out-of-order. Note that this is still eventual consistency and makes no guarantees about how soon things will be consistent, just that they will eventually reach such a state.
I think this work was different from previous work partly because of the size of systems in today's world; concurrency control schemes which previously worked fine are reaching the limits of their scalability and it is important that we investigate new ways to achieve the same consistency guarantees in more scalable ways.
One trade-off is generality vs. speed; not everything can easily be represented as a CRDT. There is also the trade-off of ease of use; CRDTs are only eventually consistent, and this must be planned for as an application programmer.
I can definitely see this paper being influential moving forward--though I don't see CRDTs in this form being widely used, the ideas are important.
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