> The only other place where I see this is useful is competing tasks. One task needs more resources from a thread pool shared by other tasks. A pid controller can allocate existing threads based off of pressure. Allocating more threads to a pool in this case though, still doesn't make sense.

Imagine you got 16 CPUs/cores and a 4 stage pipeline, lets say we want to run one thread per CPU/core for max performance (avoiding context switching). Without knowing anything about the workload: what is the best way to distributed the threads over the stages? You can't tell. Even if you tested all the possilble ways to spread out the threads over the different stages on some particular workload, then as the workload changes you wouldn't have optimal allocation anymore. A controller can adjust the threads per stage until it finds the optimal allocation for the current workload and change it as it changes.