I agree with you, Dan, and Adam Wathan for that matter.
The point of my comment had more to do with front-loading of a pitch with copy specifically tailored for confirmation bias.
Running to achieve weight loss can be hard. So much so that it's intended value can't be realized, or even be detrimental to the end goal. But I think we'd agree that anyone who simply says says "Running won't help you lose weight because it doesn't work, try this instead" is not seeking to help you, just sell you.
This was also React's initial pitch as well: getting DOM updates right is hard, use vDom instead!
The truth is that the majority of frontend development is devs racing to shovle the latest stack of tickets that management cooked up with little collaboration or rhyme and reason into the Done column of JIRA (web dev is particularly imperiled by shitty lay management), any DX affordance they can get their hands on is valuable to this goal
Concurrently, designers are pumping out comps as fast as possible to match pace with no real system cohering the whole thing, you need a design system to provide an "abstract interface", so to speak, for your CSS to really transcend into real separation.
This is just what I've observed working at my comp
This talk by Dan Abramov helped me understand better how 'best practices' are often taken so literally that their value is lost: https://www.deconstructconf.com/2019/dan-abramov-the-wet-cod...