"No SMR with ZFS" is probably a bit overblown. It simply depends on your use case. Rebuilds certainly are a problem but beyond that I think it's simply "be ok

"No SMR with ZFS" is probably a bit overblown. It simply depends on your use case. Rebuilds certainly are a problem but beyond that I think it's simply "be ok with slow drives". I've been operating a decently sized SMR pool for 3 years now with no major issues, including surviving two drive failures. If you try to put random write workloads onto SMR you're gonna have a bad time no matter what you do. In my use case it's great, since this is effectively WORM storage writing giant files to disk all at once so I have effectively 0% fragmentation and all subsequent reads of the file tend to be sequential. That said, this is for my personal use and lab projects. Not sure I'd go ZFS+SMR for a production workload.