perhaps running out of inodes could be taken "more seriously"?

Now that you learned about the issue of inodes running out, you know to add it to your monitoring.
It's very much the same as running out of disk space, which isn't that uncommon with some logging
getting out of hand either. Both can be checked with `df`.

Also, there's the possibility of distributing unrelated data on separate file systems, or using quotas to
protect the rest of the system from an application getting out of hand.