"O_EXCL isn't reliable on NFS" is an overstatement so severe it seems to say something different than the actual behavior. It should be "O_EXCL isn't 100% reliable on NFS if two different systems are manipulating the same file at virtually the same time".
If your program is only running on one system, or if the file has already existed for a couple minutes, then O_EXCL _is_ 100% reliable.