The principle is very general. Colimits are the essence of gluing pieces of data together so they appear just about everywhere in mathematics in some form or another. Vector clocks do form an instance of colimits. A special kind in fact, a colimit of a partially ordered set of objects.

There is a fundamental lemma of category theory that says that you can always embed a category into a larger one that allows all colimits, i.e. gluing constructions (subject to cardinality considerations).