Ah, that's cool! Yeah, definitely think you should try it again :) Very brutal!
Very similar to what I have done the past 8 months basically. My coach (that I unfortunately had to stop working with due to economical reasons) often had me do one heavier set then backing off 20-30% doing slightly more reps or an intensifier such as rest-pause, cluster set and so on.
Training alone for the most part I definitely won't go to absolute failure on everything but rather to technical failure and past that depending on the exercise. The aim is always failure but how it look will vary or how I should explain it. I do my best to not compensate for the technique and rep tempo during the set no matter how hard it gets.