OTOH, reserved keys are for end-user-facing features...
But, is it reader's responsibility to control how they are shown? Presumably, for a use case like the one described above, the user would not see those tags directly, but see them rendered as 👍, 👎 anyway.
Some kind of locking is probably required to implement a use case like reactions (thumbs up/down etc., https://github.com/lemon24/reader/issues/228#issuecomment-817072794) correctly. Use cases like implementing comments (with versions) might benefit too.
Optimistic locking seems like a reasonable enough solution.
(Note we don't need this for feeds/entries because they're more or less eventually consistent.)
Relevant resources:
Open questions:
.reader.search
in https://github.com/lemon24/reader/issues/228#issuecomment-835767543.