It is simple enough for an adversarial system to subvert some members via collusion and others via obstruction. Take something like Consul which can elect new members and remove old ones (often necessary in modern cloud architectures). What does 50.1% mean when the divisor can be changed?
And meshes are extremely weird because the whole point is to connect nodes that cannot mutually see each other. It is quite difficult to know for sure if you’re hallucinating the existence of a node two hops away from yourself. You’ve never seen each other, except maybe when the weather was just right one day months ago.
Could you elaborate? It sounds like you are talking more about challenges of distributed consensus (elections, raft). What I have in mind is distributed peering algorithms for decentralized networks. No consensus, elections, or quorum required. You may wish to run consensus algos on top of such networks but that's one layer up, if you will.
Byzantine in the context of unpermissioned networks is often explained as the sybil problem, which maps to the issues you mention.
Applying OP to this setting wouldn't mitigate that but I'm thinking it can be used as a framework to model and reason about these systems. Perhaps even prove certain properties (assuming some form of sybil resistance mechanism, I guess).
Think about how BGP makes the front page news about once every couple of years.