Have you considered backing your application's state-synchronization with a centralized CQRS/ES event store (e.g. https://www.eventstore.com/)? You get the same semantics, without paying the overhead of building them on top of a CRDT abstraction; and the event store itself also "knows" (in the sense that it supplies the framework and you supply the logic) how to reduce over states in order to build snapshot states ("aggregates") for clients to download for fast initial synchronization.
We basically have that as well! We use CRDTs on the client to allow for optimistic updates and fast replication of events directly to other clients but we also do exactly what you describe on the server so that a user loading the data for the first time just gets the "snapshot" and then plays events on top of it.
