Is this relevant for other databases? For postgres for example, which supports concurrent writers, wouldn't sequential keys lead to contention on the page at the frontier?
That's a good question. I don't know the answer. I will say, generally you can get higher write throughput with a single writer. Even more so if you're prepared to shard along boundaries where you don't need atomic transactions.
Contention and coordination are real killers, concurrent writes (that require coordination like postgres) often underdeliver.
