Comment by imiric

The scenarios you mentioned are indeed nice use cases of ZFS, but other tools can do this too.

I can make snapshots and recover files with SnapRAID or Kopia. In the case of a laptop system drive failure, I have scripts to quickly setup a new system, and restore data from backups. Sure, the new system won't be a bit-for-bit replica of the old one, and I'll have to manually tinker to get everything back in order, but these scenarios are so uncommon that I'm fine with this taking a bit more time and effort. I'd rather have that over relying on a complex filesystem whose performance degrades over time, and is difficult to work with and understand.

You speak about ZFS as if it's a silver bullet, and everything else is inferior. The reality is that every technical decision has tradeoffs, and the right solution will depend on which tradeoffs make the most sense for any given situation.