I want to say a physical disk being yanked from the system (essentially what was happening, as far as the OS could tell) does cause I/O errors in Linux? I could be wrong though, this isn't exactly something I try to exercise.
As for it being a distributed system … I suppose? But that's what an FS's log is for: when the drive reconnects, there will either be a pending WAL entry, or not. If there is, the write can be persisted, otherwise, it is lost. But consistency should still happen.
Now, an app might not be ready for that, but that's an app bug.
But it can always happen that the power goes out, which in my situation is equivalent to a disk yank. There's also small children, the SO tripping over a cable, etc.
But these are different failure modes from some of what the above post listed, such as disks undoing acknowledged writes, or lying about having persisted the write. (Some of the examples are byzantine, some are not.)