With this approach you'd still need to communicate the current clock number back to clients as otherwise one will get ahead and have all its traffic accepted, and others will fall behind and be unable to get traffic accepted. Even if an error causes a client to bump forwards to retry, by the time it has done that the number it is about to retry with may have been used.
Additionally, the aim is still to get exactly-once delivery, so clients need to be able to differentiate between an error caused by them reusing an ID that was rejected to enforce exactly-once delivery, and an error caused by another client getting that ID.
Basically, this issue is easy to solve with low traffic and reliable persistent storage everywhere, but hard to solve with high traffic, or the acceptance that all persistent storage brings additional reliability challenges.
You can assign an ID to your nodes and let them generate increasing numbers on their own. Node ID decides on a tie, and if one node sees a larger counter value appear, it adjusts its own counter so that it doesn't stay behind:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_clock