I have been using Automerge recently for a project, and I have found it to be very, very user-friendly.
Our use-case is offline-editing of documents with an eventual sync-with-yourself-online. It's mostly there as a sync tool, not as a p2p colalb editing. Unless you count yourself as a peer, I guess!
We store a document in local storage which is the result of `Automerge.save(automergedoc) => serializable string`. That can be loaded with `Automerge.load(s) => doc`.
"Changes" are a first-class concept in automerge (makes sense, I guess) so you can do
before = Automerge.from({..some doc..})
after = Automerge.change(before, "optional commit msg", (doc) => doc.hello = "world);
With that done, you can get a diff, `Automerge.getChanges(before, after) => [changes]`.
Those `[changes]` are what we try and send to a server and keep them in a `Set()` for each document (background sync, service worker, etc make a nice experience.
This is all wrapped up in Redux, and a middleware that captures the changes, and a reduxStore subscriber that puts the document back into local storage after any changes.
It is for the application programmer virtually transparent, and so far we've yet to find a fault with it.
I'm sure I'll come to regret making "changes" my principle data type, as the server implementation just sees serialized blobs of data, and has no concept of the structure of the document. That's solveable if I need it ever, because there's a protcol compatible implementation in Rust, and I could always use the JavaScript one on the server too, just haven't needed yet.
The serialization is also quite large, in the order of kilobytes for what are actually quite small docs, but they do contain the original commit messages too, and the Automerge team is planning to release an optimized serialization format early this year, which they say will be especially useful for fields with lots of changes, such as text fields, which currently pay a heavy toll in terms of tracking `[changes]`. Fortunately that also doesn't affect me.
I can also +1 some of the advice to keep your whole document in a CRDT. We use React+Redux, but since React Hooks made stateless functional components a reality, we felt it was appropriate to use React exclusively for the UI state, and track only document states in Redux reducers. It feels light-weight and sustainable, although we're only about a month and 5k LOC into the project. Time will tell I guess.