Ah k, thanks a lot! Thinking about it more, I was confused whose "state" the system reverts to in the event of a desync. But that's irrelevant because the system takes into account all inputs anyways, I guess.
I suppose if one was writing a game from scratch, it might be smarter for the netcode to be aware of animations, so rather than, "He activated his 10 frame jab 5 frames ago, so instantly jump to frame 5 now", it would instead play all/some of the frames of that jab in the remaining 5 frames, at a higher speed to fit it in. Gameplay stuff like hitboxes will remain at the original speed, so its purely a visual hack.
For a 3D game, that would result in smoother visuals than a raw teleport.
Although expert players may not like the loss of precision when visuals no longer exactly match underlying mechanics.