Comment by tomjakubowski

That sort of table can be quite handy when every entity in the business's data stew is identified with a UUID, and there is no way of telling just from looking at an identifier what kind of entity it is. Particularly when the business has disparate databases and/or microservices with their own sets of UUIDs.

In such businesses, inevitably, someone will ask you to run process X for widget 8dbcd950-14c1-4877-a8b0-90c081ce033c, and that particular identifier will actually be an ID of some associated data, not the widget. You can push back and say, "That isn't a widget identifier, can you please look up the widget identifier?" It's better to be able to look that ID up in your ID ⮕ entity type lookup table, and say "the ID you provided is a widget production run ID, which produced a copy of widget a84969be-137a-41ca-97c4-515497184df9. Can you confirm this is the widget you need process X done for?", with a link to the product-facing widget page.

(Also handy for the case where some code was intended to log an ID for one entity, but actually logs the ID for an associated entity with the wrong entity type indicated.)