Vector clocks don't solve this problem, as they only provide a partial ordering. When multiple messages are in flight in the same 'simultaneity window', different observers may receive them in different orders and vector clocks can't determine a consistent order of those events.

Vector clocks could be used determine the order is inconsistent. But what do you do with that information? You might likely have follow on events where A and B are unordered, and A1 was sent only seeing A, B1 sent only seeing B, and C was sent seeing A and B without seeing A1 and B1. It only gets more complex from there.

I'm not a UX person, but I can't imagine how to show this to users without causing massive confusion and information overload. There's a very small set of people that have studied distributed communication that would get this. And I haven't seen any UI that shows similar information in a coherent way... maybe git graphs, but I don't see how you make that fit on a phone screen where you're having a group chat.

Maybe just some indicator that says other people may see these messages in a different order, but then if it's not an immediately obvious signal, it's not really going to help users understand.