Is there a more active way to indicate that a node expects to die? Say, a shutdown handler that manually evicts itself from the cluster with a last, 'I'm dead' state. Would this be useful?
Depending on the need, it can be implemented on client side as well as on chitchat. We actually thought of this feature as a way for a node to normaly exclude itself from the cluster (maybe for application update). We are still evaluating how necessary this is because a node crash or normal shutdown can just work. Future experience will surely tell us.
I forgot to reference the issue https://github.com/quickwit-oss/chitchat/issues/30