I don't think that's true. The ideas of causality, logical clocks and vector clocks have not been abandoned in any sense. In fact, there seems to be significant new interest in eventually consistent systems over the last few years, and interest in vector clocks and highly available (in the CAP 'AP' sense) systems is still growing. The excitement about research into CRDTs is a good illustration of this.
More fundamentally, though, Spanner doesn't involve absolute synchronicity in any real sense. Instead, at least as described in their paper, the focus is on using the special clocks to improve some system properties by bounding absolute clock skew. The ideas of causally related operations, and the orderings between these operations, is still important even in that environment.
More fundamentally, though, Spanner doesn't involve absolute synchronicity in any real sense. Instead, at least as described in their paper, the focus is on using the special clocks to improve some system properties by bounding absolute clock skew. The ideas of causally related operations, and the orderings between these operations, is still important even in that environment.