What about this is a surprising result? Optimize as directly as possible for load balancing the thing(s) that matter most to your users (e.g. latency), not the thing that indirectly correlates to the thing(s) that matter (CPU Utilization). I've been making this exact argument at work for a while.

Funny to read this article today, just after myself and two others at work also just saved the company we work at far more than our combined expected lifetime gross earnings with a single (different) optimization.