I meant to ask about the transaction period of the first row (my bad, "superseded" is ambiguous), but I think I get that one now: the transaction period is still open because we still believe (and probably will forever) that that's the correct validity period for that address. Is that right? And the validity period for the middle one never closes because there's never a time in that row's transaction period where we know the end of the validity period.

The intuition I'm building is that the validity period is metadata and the transaction period is metametadata. I think the similarity between them is a little deceptive, since the validity period is in some sense just another piece of data sort of controlled by (or interpreted in light of) the transaction period, which is itself a way to simulate versioning the whole database; I think of it like the internal representation for a database wrapper that lets you time travel in a database with a history-oblivious schema. In that vision, validity periods are actually part of the history-oblivious schema. You could totally have "transaction periods" for stuff with no concept of validity period, e.g. something timeless where our understanding evolves over time. If you're trying to teach people, I'd suggest introducing the two concepts independently, then showing the interplay with an example like the one you gave here.

I don't know if weird nested contexts can ever be really "intuitive". :D