I used to fly 747-200 around the Saudi, UAE and Somalia areas for some years, and had only one single tire on one occasion 'thermal' out on me!
The technique we found worked best for us was to not select any autobrakes at all, use max reverse at the earliest opportunity, then use manual braking, as required, below 100 knots, and always use the entire available runway. With that technique, as I said, we had few brake overheat problems. Oh they certainly got hot, but stayed up!
That's what I used to do flying the freighters into Dubai, hot and at MLW most of the time. By not using autobrake for touchdown it'd give you about one unit better on the brake temps, usually enough to have them hovering around near the top of the yellow band. Autobrake would almost always have the brakes just into the red and so you'd have to call for brake cooling carts.