How Does the EVM’s Transaction Atomicity Relate to This Attack?

The EVM's transaction atomicity means that a transaction is either fully executed, with all state changes finalized, or it is completely reverted, with no state changes. A read-only reentrancy attack exploits the fact that while the transaction is atomic, the execution of the contract logic within the transaction is not instantaneous.

The attack occurs during the execution of the transaction, where a re-entrant call can read a state that is temporarily inconsistent before the transaction completes and the state is fully finalized.