> Would it have helped in the past Sync meltdowns?

Yes, but I think that's particular to the way sync behaves.  It does lots of background activity that can profitably be delayed upon request.  It also gets a lot of value out of allowing clients to complete a sync, no matter how slowly, as this tends to decrease load on the DB due to future retries.

I'm happy to remove it here as its value would be marginal at best.