Effective monitoring. Prometheus is free and open source. There are other paid options.
In the meantime you can monitor rate of throttling and rate of CPU usage to limit ratio. Nothing stops you from doing this while also monitoring response latency.
On the other hand CPU request DOES potentially leave unused CPU cycles on the table since it's a reservation on the node whether you're using it or not.
Again needs may vary.
You can overprovision limit.
This is easy to test for yourself.