I generally agree with this but one thing I will say is that if you work in a huge codebase with a lot of engineers, people are going to end up throwing all kinds of insane work loads into whatever thread pool you have. The old adage about how if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. Typically in a big codebase like this it might be discouraged or forbidden to create lots of your own work threads in your own pool, so in practice your'e just going to end up throwing items into whatever thread pool you're allowed to use, which is the one that's going to end up with silly optimizations like work-stealing (even if most sanely structured programs won't benefit from work-stealing).