Keyset cron may take a long time doing automated key rolls when nameservers it tries to reach are not responding. With locking any other commands issued while cron is running will block until cron has finished. It would be nice if read commands such status could bypass the lock.
The state is updated by writing to a new file and then renaming, so reading the state file is safe. Without locking there is however a risk that the config file and the state file are out of sync.