Accessibility can’t be overstated. Be it the invention of the mouse or touch screen smartphones. It is what gets more people to the cool stuff we like to use. And this is a good thing.
Imagine those 200k as being the MBR reservation you see on disks. With enough reservation to add vdevs and alter pool config later on, or just writing zeros to add feature flags later because every new ZFS version brings nice and fancy feature flags.
There are talks to increase that to ~1G soon…because with increasing sector sizes on SSDs, 10-20 year old assumptions have to be adjusted.
dRaid is great for what it was designed for, large amounts of data with mostly >1M recordsize. It’s certainly not a good choice for your average and mixed data pool with 8k stuff on it.