If you need to pick a version, then it's not a CRDT. Normally, you would use the right CRDT to fit the problem space, provided the problem space can be modeled

If you need to pick a version, then it's not a CRDT. Normally, you would use the right CRDT to fit the problem space, provided the problem space can be modeled using commutative operations. CRDTs require the problem space to be defined in terms of commutative operations. That's just a requirement of the data structure, just like binary search requires a sorted list. If that requirement is met, then there would be no conflicts and no merges by design. That's the beauty of CRDTs. They are perfect for multi-master distributed settings. You wouldn't use a CRDT to store the raw contents of an Excel document or a Javascript file, since those file formats were not designed to be modeled using commutative operations. I think that's the use case you have in mind? For that you would need manual merges, regardless of the data structure or binary string you use to represent the document.