Smart admins know how to make labels unique enough to stay out of trouble. I generally make the last 3-4 digits of the device serial number, accessible without powering up the device, a component of each volume label. On mine, Linux native filesystems fstab entries are normally by a LABEL of 7-13 characters. Mounting here is by UUID only if I boot a new installation before editing its machine-generated fstab to rid it of UUIDs. I have hundreds of filesystems scattered about several dozen multi-multiboot PCs, and STBs, and frequently clone, normally without incident, easily fixed in those rare cases incident happens.

Yep, but a lot of people aren't that detailed. I do the same as you but allow the system to use the UUIDs it designates for a new install and use labels for everything else I add.

The serial number is only partially helpful if there are multiple partitions on the drive, and most don't have access to that data on home machines anyway.

Naturally. e.g. LABEL cH6Ep17f34, merely 10 characters (same count as a bazillion phone numbers) instead of 36, for

• Brand: crucial
• Serial: …H6E
• partition:17
• OS: fedora 34

This would not likely be as perplexing with an identical HD identically configured with F34 in an "identical" PC (with its unique HD serial #) as it would trying to determine whether every filesystem in every multiboot PC fstab is appropriately being mounted based upon randomly generated unique strings of 36 alphanumeric characters.

I disagree. IME, the physical label always matches the hardware info (unless no serial at all, in which case a model number or bar code number should suffice):Thus the reason for selection of serial string as LABEL (identifier) portion.