Adding new disks to an existing ZFS pool is as easy as figuring out what new redundancy scheme you want, then adding them with that scheme to the pool. E.g. you have an existing pool with a RAIDz1 vdev with 3 4TB disks. You found some cheap recertified disks and want to expand with more redundancy to mitigate the risk. You buy 4 16TB disks, create a RAIDz2 vdev and add that to the existing pool. The pool grows in storage by whatever is the space available from the new vdev. Critically pools are JBODs of vdevs. You can add any number or type of vdevs to a pool. The redundancy is done at the vdev level. Thus you can have a pool with a mix of any RAIDzN and/or mirrors. You don't create a new pool and transition to it. You add another vdev with whatever redundancy topology you want to the existing pool and keep writing data to it. You don't even have to offline it. If you add a second RAIDz1 to an existing RAIDz1, you'd get similar redundancy to moving from RAIDz1 to RAIDz2.
Finally if you have some even stranger hardware lying around, you can combine it in appropriately sized volumes via LVM and give that to ZFS, as someone already suggested. I used to have a mirror with one real 8TB disk and one 8TB LVM volume consisting of 1TB, 3TB and 4TB disk. Worked like a charm.
What you lose in space, you gain in redundancy. As long as you're not looking for the absolute least redundant setup, it's not a bad tradeoff. Typically running a large stripe array with a single redundancy disk isn't a great idea. And if you're running mirrors anyway, you don't lose any additional space to redundancy.