Not sure what you might mean by 'crap out'. If you have soft-mounted a remote export and the network goes away, then your applications experience i/o errors which they either handle one way or another or not, which yields silent data corruption, but you have been warned about that. If you have hard-mount'ed an remote export and the network connection to that server goes dark, then any access to files residing on that will stall ('hang') until the network issue is resolved.

What exactly do you want the client to do, when it relies on remote resources and the network isn't reliable? This fortunately is these days much less a problem than in the days of cheapernet (10BASE2).

> unlike, i imagine, any FUSE driver

FUSE drivers aren't exempt from hanging syscalls, I've experienced them even with local mounts let alone network ones. I don't know why people keep repeating this.