Yeah, but the reality is somewhat more complicated when you operationalize. The pepperId can be the same for everything, or can be per shard, or just chunked across large sets of records. And pepperId = 1 can have the value of the empty string, which is what all non-peppered have. Now it’s easy to increment the pepperId for new records and have a real value stored elsewhere.

But... bring it to the ultimate conclusion and you essentially are splitting the salt between local and remote storage.