Let's dive into crafting a unique identifier generator, a cornerstone in many distributed systems. The challenge lies in creating IDs that are not only unique but also efficiently generated, especially when dealing with high-throughput scenarios and multiple concurrent processes.

Imagine you're building a large-scale e-commerce platform. Each order needs a unique ID, each product, each user, etc. If you generate these IDs poorly, you risk collisions (two entities with the same ID), which can lead to catastrophic data corruption and application failure. Moreover, the generation needs to be fast to avoid bottlenecks during peak hours, impacting user experience and potentially losing revenue. Finally, you want these IDs to be somewhat "sortable" by time, so you can easily query the most recent orders/products/users.

The task is to design and implement a UUID generator that addresses these concerns.

Requirements