You shouldn't have to do these steps. Manual balancing is a workaround for a critical flaw in the implementation. In my last major use of Btrfs, whole archive

You shouldn't have to do these steps. Manual balancing is a workaround for a critical flaw in the implementation. In my last major use of Btrfs, whole archive rebuilds of Debian, it would take less than 48 hours to completely unbalance a brand new Btrfs filesystem. ~25k snapshots continuously created and deleted over the period in 20 parallel jobs absolutely toasted the filesystem, even though it was 1% utilised for the most part, 10% at peak usage. The point I want to make is that a Btrfs filesystem can become unbalanced at some indeterminate point in the future, which makes it impossible to rely on if you want to guarantee continued service. I've also suffered from a number of dataloss incidents which likely are fixed now, but despite lots of bugfixing, there are still major flaws to address.