The issue is that their is a chance of an unrecoverable read error, URE, occurring during the disk replacement. It’s not a hard number in concrete, but the estimate is that it can happen with 2TB and larger disks due to the amount of data to re-sync. Especially if the RAID-Z1 or RAID-5 has more disks, or if the RAID-Z1 uses more data in the vDev.
This URE would be on one of the other RAID-Z1 disks, AND the disk being replaced has been removed completely. Since you have only 1 parity, ANY used failed sector on the source disks can lead to data loss. Most consumer hard disk drive have specified probably UREs at 2^14, (or was it 10^14?), or something like that for the statistical probability of encountering a URE. That gets REALLY noticeable for HDDs larger than 2TBs.
One way to reduce the chance of the problem occurring, is to do a replace in place. If the disk to be replaced is not fully failed, and you have another disk slot, you can install the replacement disk before you remove the failing disk.
This allows ZFS to use both the failing disk’s good data, and any other redundancy it has, like RAID-Z1 parity. Or metadata extra copies. In essence, ZFS creates a temporary Mirror between the failing disk, and it’s replacement. Whence the replacement is fully re-silvered / re-synced, the failing disk is removed from the pool. Then the user can remove it from the server.
Note that when I say “ANY used failed sector on the source disks can lead to data loss”, if the failed sector can be re-read successfully, no problem. Or if it has extra copies, like with “copies=2”. And by default, all Metadata has more than 1 copy, even on RAID-Z1. So again no problem. But, Metadata is generally a very small percentage of the used storage, so rare statistically speaking.
Last, ZFS has one more trick to handle such events, telling you which file(s) is / are bad. Then allowing you to restore that file(s), without having to do anything else to the pool. A normal RAID-5 that experiences a URE during disk replacement is screwed, Likely it is full restore time.