Local first collaborative Spreadsheets. Are CRDTs useful?

The last 15 years have witnessed a proliferation of uses of CRDTs for local-first applications. In this context text editors have made significant progress. Things like row/column insert/delete, cell edits, undo/redo, shared formulas, strictness, etc, pose significant hurdles when trying to apply a CRDT blindly. Although there are a number of recent research papers dealing with collaborative spreadsheets in theory, here we explore the use of CRDTs in a complex real world spreadsheet engine such as IronCalc.