Epoch-based reclamation is the exact mechanism behind Rust's crossbeam-epoch crate, which underpins production lock-free structures used in databases like TiKV, and it's the userspace analog of Linux's RCU grace periods. It exists because freeing a node the instant it's unlinked is unsafe when other threads might still hold a stale pointer to it, and hazard pointers (the alternative) impose per-access bookkeeping costs that epoch batching avoids.