The answer, of course, is in the paper: "time complexity" here doesn't have its usual meaning, but is defined as "the number of times a processor relies on the

The answer, of course, is in the paper: "time complexity" here doesn't have its usual meaning, but is defined as "the number of times a processor relies on the adversary to schedule a computation step or to deliver messages". The paper implies that this is the usual definition used in distributed systems analysis.