Not a dev - but, iirc -
If you want to track the UIDs yourself, you can - you just have to tell the Zero to allocate maxInt64 uids (via the grpc call AssignUids()). Then they are all allocated and you can place them however you want. If you dont tell the zero to assign all the IDs you need, you will get errors like “this is above the max allocated UID”
Any dgraph dev feel free to correct me.