I don't really know what you mean regarding pathological subdivisions, but the case where nodes go offline without merging first is a real issue. There are ways to work around it but if you have to do so you lose a lot of its advantage compared to other schemes.
When I did that talk I was at the point you are now, trying to find a real use case. I had considered them for Lima but we were actually find with version vectors.
I think the case where ITCs can really shine is when you have a lot of short-lived nodes. That could be containers or serverless functions, for instance. I didn't think about the tracing use case but it makes a lot of sense, you can fork a new node per request.
When I did that talk I was at the point you are now, trying to find a real use case. I had considered them for Lima but we were actually find with version vectors.
I think the case where ITCs can really shine is when you have a lot of short-lived nodes. That could be containers or serverless functions, for instance. I didn't think about the tracing use case but it makes a lot of sense, you can fork a new node per request.