[sgarland]

Many distributed databases have mechanisms to use an auto-increment, actually - often, generating large chunks at a time to hand out.

[grapesodaaaaa]

Our “distributed database” at a fortune 90 company spans at least 10 different database products.

UUIDv4 lets us sidestep this.

Is it bad design? Probably. Is it going to happen at huge companies? Yes.

[sgarland]

You’re not wrong, of course. It’s a natural consequence of the eschewing of DBAs, and the increasingly powerful compute available - even if someone did notice that the slowdown was due to the PK choice, they can often “fix” that by paying more money.