The last time when I have used RHEL was decades ago, so I do not have any idea about what happens there.

On the other hand, I have been using XFS since 2005 (since when I have transitioned from 32-bit Linux to 64-bit Linux), on a great variety of hardware systems, servers, desktops, mini-PCs, laptops.

My file systems are typically mostly full and from time to time I had incidents when some job failed by filling completely the file system and no longer having any space left for writing the remainder of the files being written.

Filling completely the HDD or SSD has never caused any problems. I have always just deleted some files or moved some files to other file systems, and I have continued working. Sometimes I had some downloading in progress, which was halted by the browser because of full disk, and in such cases, after making space, I just resumed the download in the browser.

So I am puzzled by your experience, but I am not very surprised because in Linux there are many obscure configuration options, so the behavior can vary a lot between distributions (I typically use Gentoo). Perhaps your problems were caused by certain daemons that were continuing to make write attempts in the background, which I do not have.

The only problems that I have ever encountered in XFS happened only in early XFS, i.e. 2 decades ago, which was extremely sensitive to power failures, despite being a journaled filesystem. In early XFS, after a power failure, some previously open files were erased, even if they had been open only for reading. Because of this, a power failure frequently bricked the system, by erasing "/etc/fstab".

However, this stupid XFS feature has been corrected many years ago and nowadays power failures normally do not have any effect on XFS, i.e. xfs_repair is normally not needed, even after power failures. That was a bug at the conceptual level, not at the programming level, because the erasure of some files in early XFS was intentional, because it wrongly concluded that they might have been corrupted.

While early XFS was notorious for its fragility against power failures, at that time none of the competing file systems was significantly better, all were buggy. Around the same time, more than two decades ago, I have seen a lot of other filesystems corrupted by power failures, regardless whether they were Windows NTFS or Linux EXT3 or JFS, despite the fact that all were advertised as being resistant to power failures by being journaled. At that time, only one filesystem was completely impervious to power failures, and it was non-journaled, the FreeBSD UFS with "soft updates" (i.e. with a careful ordering of the disk writes, to maintain a consistent state across power failures).