The function is used for two purposes: 1) for subscribers of streams to
get a token they can use to get further updates with, and 2) for
replication to track position of the writers of the stream.
For streams with a single writer the two scenarios produce the same
result, however the situation becomes complicated for streams with
multiple writers. The current `MultiWriterIdGenerator` does not
correctly handle the first case (which is not an issue as its only used
for the `caches` stream which nothing subscribes to outside of
replication).
Erik Johnston