This is in response to: https://gist.github.com/derek-knox/2aee55a146276b0514581f36b36b3f54
Here's some thoughts:
As long as even distribution is a soft goal and not a hard constraint, and you've got that specific set of small box sizes, it seems pretty tractable. It would be harder if your box sizes were weird and large like 4x19, etc. But with 1x1 in there, you can always find some solution that fills the region even if it ends up using more 1x1 boxes than you want.
There are probably a number of algorithms that would work. With those specific box sizes, I might try: