The Google internal equivalent to cron has a ? placeholder in the scheduling spec syntax letting the scheduler deterministically pick an arbitrary valid value within the field range. So ? 2 ... will pick any minute between 02:00 and 02:59 (and I suspect any second within that minute). The value is derived from a hash of the job definition, so overall this spreads the cron load within the hour.

Obviously cron jobs are not all equal in terms of load and duration, and hours are not all equal in terms of usage, but that still helps prevent trivial spikes similar to the one mentioned in the article (disclaimer: I'm not aware of a recent counterfactual experiment proving this, but that seems a fair assumption).

I suppose one would end up with checks happening on a random second instead of a random minute - reducing the size of the spike by a factor of 60, but still spiky.