I'm going into pedantic territory, but since we're on the topic of drawing order for translucent meshes... might as well. You don't actually avoid the problem

I'm going into pedantic territory, but since we're on the topic of drawing order for translucent meshes... might as well. You don't actually avoid the problem entirely when you're using just triangles because it's still possible to construct a "A overlaps B overlaps C overlaps A" cycle of occlusion using three triangles. It's more or less the same corner case as a cyclic occlusion problem with convex pole-shaped meshes. For this reason it seems like graphics engines tend to just batch-render entire sub-meshes at a time because rendering entire meshes presents little additional complexity over rendering individual polygons (and is more performant). It's a leaky abstraction but the leaks are pretty rare.