That's exactly what I meant by "just as bad as RAID". Expanding an existing array is analogous to every single drive in the array failing and getting replaced with higher capacity drives.
When a drive fails, the array is in a degraded state. Additional drive failures put the entire system in danger of data loss. The rebuilding process generates enormous I/O loads on all the disks. Not only does it take an insane amount of time, according to my calculations the probability of read errors happening during the error recovery process is about 3%. Such expansion operations have a real chance of destroying the entire array.
Also resilvers are not as intensive when rebuilding a mirror as you are just copying from one disk in the vdev to the other, not all X other drives and recalculating parity at the same time. This means less reads across the entire array and much much quicker resilver times, thus less window for drive failure.
But don't just take my word for it. This is a blog post that go much into much more detail https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs...
Sure the density isn't great as you're essentially running at 50% or raw storage but - touches wood - my home zpool has been running strong for about a decade doing the above from 6x 6tb drives (3x 6tb mirrors) to 16x 10-20tb drives (8x mirrors, differing sized drives but matched per mirror like a 10tb x2 mirror, a 16tb x2 mirror etc).
Edit: Just realised someone else as already mentioned a pool or mirrors. Consider this another +1.