I see they mention Raft in the article. If they are updating a directory of ownership data via Raft then your split brain problem is addressed.

Generally, distributed locks are a fiat based system. I claim ownership of something and I have indisputable rights to that thing until lease renewal time. If the lease renewal fails for any reason I have to give up my claim on the object.

I might have an architecture that lets me make forward progress in a split brain scenario because I owned a lease before the split happened. If the recovery is fast enough then everything will be fine.

However my instincts tell me that it would take a pretty special problem domain and a very assertive dev team to maintain this invariant over a long period of time. Business people see all this data we have and they want to connect it more and more over time. They are not above selling a feature and then cajoling us into implementing it, even if it reduces long-term viability.

In the end you are left with is a distributed system with lower overhead per transaction. But that's nothing to sneeze at.