I don't think the author claims they found something groundbreakingly new. In fact just the references contain all the points Liam makes. Patches-vector seems

I don't think the author claims they found something groundbreakingly new. In fact just the references contain all the points Liam makes. Patches-vector seems to be different to ottypes for example in that ottypes have predicted what types you would want to synchronize and provides you a correspondig OT type for each of them. What if I want to synchronize binary data or javascript objects or some other weird thing? If equality is defined for my object the library shouldn't need to make any other assumptions. Besides this practicality though, I think the whole point of the article is that one can mathematically reason about patches-vector.