Author here. I've had this conversation with people a lot. And people in the CRDT world also talk about it a lot. But in practice, at least with text editing, the overhead is so tiny that I can't imagine it ever coming up in practice. Diamond types - my post-CRDT project - does (by default) grow without bound over time. But the overhead is usually less than 1 byte for every character ever typed. If I turn on LZ4 compression on the stored text, documents edited with diamond types are often smaller than the resulting document state. Even though we store the entire editing history!
I know a bunch of ways to solve this technically. But I'm just not convinced its a real problem in most systems.
(I have heard of it being a problem for someone using yjs for a 3d modelling tool. While dragging objects, they created persistent edits with each pixel movement of the mouse. But I think its smarter to use ephemeral edits for stuff like that - which aren't supported by most crdt libraries.)
Git also suffers from this problem, by the way. Repositories only grow over time. And they grow way faster than they would if modern CRDT libraries were used instead. But nobody seems bothered by it. (Yes, you can do a shallow clone in git. But almost nobody does. And you could also do that with CRDTs as well if you want!)
I don't think the concern was necessarily about overhead, but about sensitive data. This is a problem in Git too: people make the mistake of reverting a commit with sensitive values and think it's gone, but the history is still out there.
Edit: or maybe that was the concern, but this other concern exists too :)
If thats what you're worried about, use Yjs. Yjs doesn't store deleted characters in documents. Unless you actively make yjs snapshots, once a character in a yjs document is deleted, its gone.
I know a bunch of ways to solve this technically. But I'm just not convinced its a real problem in most systems.
(I have heard of it being a problem for someone using yjs for a 3d modelling tool. While dragging objects, they created persistent edits with each pixel movement of the mouse. But I think its smarter to use ephemeral edits for stuff like that - which aren't supported by most crdt libraries.)
Git also suffers from this problem, by the way. Repositories only grow over time. And they grow way faster than they would if modern CRDT libraries were used instead. But nobody seems bothered by it. (Yes, you can do a shallow clone in git. But almost nobody does. And you could also do that with CRDTs as well if you want!)