Right now clickhouse allows to create TTL columns for Distributed tables during alters. It is working normally until server restart. After that it won't start because engine distributed doesn't support TTL clause. Modify metadata is required.

My cluster has 21.3 but tested it also with 21.11 and the same behavior.
It is blocked during create but it should be also be blocked during alters.
Tested on table from tutorial
ENGINE = Distributed('stage, 'default', 'hits_v1') 
alter table hits_v1_all modify column UTMCampaign String TTL EventDate + INTERVAL 1 MONTH ← it passes normally
/** Read a set of columns from the table.
      * Accepts a list of columns to read, as well as a description of the query,
      *  from which information can be extracted about how to retrieve data
      *  (indexes, locks, etc.)
      * Returns a stream with which you can read data sequentially
      *  or multiple streams for parallel data reading.
      * The `processed_stage` must be the result of getQueryProcessingStage() function.
      *
      * context contains settings for one query.
      * Usually Storage does not care about these settings, since they are used in the interpreter.
      * But, for example, for distributed query processing, the settings are passed to the remote server.
      *
      * num_streams - a recommendation, how many streams to return,
      *  if the storage can return a different number of streams.
      *
      * metadata_snapshot is consistent snapshot of table metadata, it should be
      * passed in all parts of the returned pipeline. Storage metadata can be
      * changed during lifetime of the returned pipeline, but the snapshot is
      * guaranteed to be immutable.