Being able to handle a collision without needing the higher priority message to skip a single beat seemed like magic to me when I first learned about it
IEEE 802.4 token bus standard was withdrawn
polled buses with a master are pretty common when you don't mind the performance hit and central-point-of-failure. i believe cable networks work this way.
CAN isn't a polled bus, doesn't have a master, and doesn't impose a performance hit. However, on a bus network, every device on the bus is a single point of failure: if it starts jabbering, the network stops working.