I wonder about the categories of apps for which offline first with potentially infinitely delayed sync provides a better experience and how large those really are.
It seems like most of those are apps where I'm creating or working on something by myself and then sharing it later. The online part is almost the nice-to-have. A lot of other apps are either near-real-time-to-real-time communication where I want sending to succeed or fail pretty much immediately and queueing a message for hours and delivering it later only creates confusion. Or the app is mostly for consuming and interacting with content from elsewhere (be that an endless stream of content a la most "social media", news, video, etc. or be it content like banking apps and things) and I really mostly care about the latest information if the information is really that important at all. The cases in those apps where I interact, I also want immediate confirmation of success or failure because it's really important or not important at all.
What are the cases where offline-first is really essential? Maybe things that update, but referencing older material can be really useful or important (which does get back to messaging and email in particular, but other than something that's designed to be async like email, queueing actions when offline is still just nice-to-have in the best cases).
Otherwise the utility of CRDTs, OT, et al. is mostly collaborative editing tools that still need to be mostly online for the best experience.