We've seen that epoch-based leases can become non-functional under certain forms of partial or asymmetric network partitions, if the leaseholder can't reach the Raft leader but it is able to heartbeat its liveness record. Expiration-based leases are not vulnerable to this, since they require a Raft roundtrip to extend their lease.

As a mitigation for this, we should explore if it would be possible to add a setting that only uses expiration-based leases, taking the performance overhead into account (i.e. no quiescence and frequent lease extentions). We should benchmark how many ranges/node we can support with the setting enabled/disabled under a reasonable workload.

Jira issue: CRDB-22594

Epic CRDB-25199