I probably should have added the "in production" qualifier. Academic papers will almost always precede production use, but Chubby was definitely one of, if not the, first solutions to handle a large-scale production workload.

Also, it could be argued that previous solutions to distributed consensus are only partial solutions without the work that Google has done to ensure consistent time across the distributed cluster.

Regardless, it's hard to argue the original point that Google is on the forefront of that kind of technology.