The call to `flock()` is an exclusive advisory lock, which in my testing only PHP respects (apache continues to read it).
Not all filesystems support locking (remote NFS mounts for example) so this offers minimal benefit to those platforms, but offers much better protection against file corruption on systems which do support it.
The call is blocking, so a second process will wait for the first to complete before writing if supported.
See #31767
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