This has not been the case with configurations optimized for high utilization or random writes for a very long time. The auto-balancing behavior of recent vers

This has not been the case with configurations optimized for high utilization or random writes for a very long time. The auto-balancing behavior of recent versions approaches something that you can raise the max full parameters on with no additional tuning. In the past it's been possible to utilize a relatively large number of placement groups (for which the performance penalty insinuated in the documentation seems to be greatly exaggerated, and the complications resulting from using too few greatly understated) to approach and exceed 95% utilization even with heterogeneous OSDs. It is also possible to achieve very high utilization via manual tuning of host and osd weights. If you care about random write performance and are not using Optane or NVRAM journals, then you are doing it wrong.