I'd like to tell you that stale data will always be a thing in any serious application because light only travels so fast. Therefore, you'll need to have sensible logic in the face of stale data either way, so it's not so bad as you think.

...and while that's true, I'd still like to hear the opinion of someone more knowledgeable because it's an issue that's been bugging me too.

This is a fair point: immutable data is just part of the solution. To get the win, you need to toss out all references to the old data when you update it: then you ensure that you can't access "stale" data. This requires some discipline, either manual (e.g., reusing the same variable name for the old and new bindings to ensure the stale binding is shadowed) or automatic (e.g., linear types).

But the data can't be stale, because `a` and `b` are immutable