> You can argue that, but then what is its purpose?

The purpose is to reduce randomness while still preserving probability of uniqueness. UUIDv4 come with performance issues when used to bucket data for updates, such as when there used as primary keys in a database.

A database like MySQL or PostgreSQL has sequential ids and you’d use those instead, but if you’re writing something like iceberg tables using Trino/Spark/etc then being able to generate unique ids (without using a data store) that tend to be clustered together is useful.