When it is treated as just a filesystem, then it works about like any other modern filesystem does.
ZFS features like scrubs aren't necessary. Multiple datasets aren't necessary -- using the one created by default is fine. RAIDZ, mirrors, slog, l2arc: None of that is necessary. Snapshots, transparent compression? Nope, those aren't necessary functions for proper use, either.
There's a lot of features that a person may elect to use, but it is no worse than, say, ext4 or FFS2 is when those features are ignored completely.
(It can be tricky to get Linux booting properly with a ZFS root filesystem. But that difficulty is not shared at all with FreeBSD, wherein ZFS is a native built-in.)
When it is treated as just a filesystem, then it works about like any other modern filesystem does.
ZFS features like scrubs aren't necessary. Multiple datasets aren't necessary -- using the one created by default is fine. RAIDZ, mirrors, slog, l2arc: None of that is necessary. Snapshots, transparent compression? Nope, those aren't necessary functions for proper use, either.
There's a lot of features that a person may elect to use, but it is no worse than, say, ext4 or FFS2 is when those features are ignored completely.
(It can be tricky to get Linux booting properly with a ZFS root filesystem. But that difficulty is not shared at all with FreeBSD, wherein ZFS is a native built-in.)