man: "... if a listening session receives a notification signal while it is within a transaction, the notification event will not be delivered to its connected client until _just after_ the transaction is completed (either committed or aborted)."
Expected behavior is to deliver notification after pg_sleep is finished. Currently the one may hold opened connection (being idle and listening socket) for a long time, close it and never deliver the notification (if was busy while being notified).
All delivering problems were about overflowed queue, merging notifications and transactions handling. If we must not rely on delivering at all, then NOTIFY makes no sense.