[geon]

A product I worked on used a complex scheme of encoding some 4-5 ids into an integer by reserving certain integer ranges etc. It was super inflexible and predictably caused issues when their 16-bit ids weren't enough for new projects.

It was also very difficult to work with. I had to refactor the lovecraftian mess that generated them for an entire project of thousands of nodes. If they didn't come out exactly the same, a technician would have to spend days manually updating physical units to match the new ids. Thank God for unit tests.