For what it’s worth, this form of loss wouldn’t be possible under KRaft since they (ironically?) use Raft for the metadata and elections. Ain’t nobody starting a new cluster with Zookeeper these days.
It's pretty ironic considering they blame JVM garbage collection for bad latency, but ignore their own disk garbage collection that also seems to cause some pretty bad latency.
The disk thrashes because of fsyncs (Kafka doesn't perform any fsync's). But you can provision more disk space to mitigate this problem. And it looks like the test was set up this way to make Redpanda look worse.