My journey is quite similar. My mental model got a huge boost after I read and understood Leslie Lamports early work and the work of Edward Lee about getting deterministic results in the presence of concurrency. I even found the earliest paper with a mathematical proof that write and read must be separated in time or space (the math basics of the rust borrow checker), but don't find it anymore.

- https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandy%E2%80%93Lamport_algorit...

- https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-...