This doesn't answer your question, but I faced an issue where an application had to retry if things failed and I ended up with the "thundering herd" problem and introduced jitter without knowing it was a relatively standard practice.

I felt dirty implementing such a solution (introducing randomness for the sake of randomness is off-putting), but it worked. It wasn't until a while later that I even heard the term "jitter" in this context and realized this was a pretty decent solution for this kind of problem.

Regardless, if you're going to introduce something where adding jitter is appropriate, I'd just just add jitter. It's not premature optimization; it's an essential part of that kind of functionality.