Thinner cuts of meat like SLC spares and BB's I smoke at 225-235. I feel like I can control the result better.
Tri tips, prime rib, and leaner beef roasts I smoke at the same 225-235 low temp because they stay in the smoke longer and have a consistent pretty color from center to edge by the time I yank them at an IT of 133-135F.
Thicker cuts of pork (butt, loin, etc), beef brisket, and any poultry I'm up in the 275+ range.
Here's another point to consider, both plus and minus for higher temps. If you are smoking at the higher temps overnight, your fire dies, and you fell asleep, you have a bit more buffer of your meat staying in the safe zone until you wake up and catch it, possibly saving an expensive discard. The flipside to that is you may overshoot your target temps if it is toward the end of the smoke, which I did on my last overnight smoke of 19 lbs of pork shoulder. Thankfully the overshoot was only a few degrees and the people eating it weren't smokers so they still raved about the result. Smoking temp varied between 290-315F. Total smoke time was only 9 hours; 5 hours exposed, 4 hours wrapped.
Look up online any in-house oven recipe for tough cuts of brisket, chuck roast, or pork butt/shoulder and you'll see oven temps with everything from 325-450F and 3-6 hour cook times. Before I started smoking I turned out some fantastic oven creations, though there was no smoke flavor unless I added (yuck) Wright's Liquid Smoke. That all changed with the smoker.