There are legitimate reasons to have / not have some form of node id, and/or a timestamp, in an identifier. One reason to have them is that you don't need as go

There are legitimate reasons to have / not have some form of node id, and/or a timestamp, in an identifier. One reason to have them is that you don't need as good a PRNG. However, with a good PRNG the collision probabilities are astronomically low either way. The point of the comparison to HDD error rates is meant to indicate that the collision probability is well within what is typically considered an acceptable risk level. There's a higher probability of much worse things happening, and I accept those risks for similar pragmatic reasons. Why should I behave any differently in this case? I do encourage anyone implementing this sort of system to do the math themselves and take whatever precautions they deem necessary. I've done so and decided that the additional complexity and space trade off of the alternative approaches make them inferior for our use cases. That doesn't mean ours is universally the best choice. That's why we have UUID1 and UUID4, for instance.