You're describing this like it's supposed to work. Btrfs-raid5 is clearly labelled as a bad idea in pretty much every relevant doc. It's not an issue that the tool is broken for this use case because you're not expected to actually try that configuration. mkfs.btrfs specifically says: "RAID5/6 is still considered experimental and shouldn’t be employed for production use."
It's really not that big of an issue in that context. "How was running with scissors never tested for safety?" - just don't try it in the first place.
Personally, i would understand if some developers tried a new approach on this raid5/6 and possibly come up with new and better solutions. I am wondering why it seems to be available in mainline. Why wasn't the patch/fork/branch rejected or why wasn't the option disabled or the code completely removed? I don't have btrfs installed but it sounds like this option is available in every btrfs release, although it is warned about to NOT USE IT. Why is it available in the first place?!
ZFS started development in 2001, and released on Solaris 10 in 2006. Btrfs started development in 2007, and the disk format was stabilized in 2013. ZFS has continued to gain features over the years, but I would say btrfs was largely developed after ZFS and still hasn't reached feature parity with the original release of ZFS due to the RAID5 issue.
You know what, thinking about it, I do actually have some rather choice words to describe the situation:
This boggles the mind to a level that requires further explanation, because the casual observer would likely fail to grasp the enormity of the failure that has occurred here. This isn't like, "oops, I forgot to up-shift gears in my car when going on the onramp", this is more like "the pilot forgot about the flaps after takeoff and the plane ran out of fuel.". There's a fundamental difference in the expectation of quality between, say, a random command line utility and a RAID filesystem.
To give some context: BTRFS was developed largely concurrent with, and in direct competition to Sun's ZFS. Unlike all previous SAN arrays, RAID cards, and filesystems, ZFS was explicitly designed for reliability. Sun famously had a 'test rig' where they abused each new build to death. Physically pulling disks. Randomly corrupting blocks. Running multiple operation types in parallel, while pulling disks. That kind of thing.
When I read ZFS whitepapers, I was amazed at how many fundamental flaws in RAID integrity protection they discovered, and then solved. Rigorously.
Meanwhile, BTRFS literally says, in 2020: Don't trust is, especially not for metadata, or data, or while scrubbing, which you had better baby-sit, otherwise say goodbye to your production environment!
More fun quotes:
You'd have to be nuts to use BTRFS for RAID 5 or 6, and I would question its use for any form of RAID.PS: To the people downvoting this, please explain how you like people to be uninformed about catastrophic data corruption going ignored for 4 years below in the comments.