"Best practices" means something sensible in most subfields of capital-E Engineering. (In fact, I think that's where the term originates from, with all other usages being a corruption of the original concept.)
In Engineering, "best practices" are the set of "just do X" answers that will let you skip deriving every answer about what material or design to use from first principles for cases where there's a known dominant solution. For example, "for a load-bearing pillar, use steel-reinforced concrete, in a cylindrical shape, with a cross-sectional diameter following formula XYZ given the number of storeys of the building." You can (and eventually must!) still do a load simulation for the building, to see that the pillar can hold things up without cracking — but you don't have to model the building when selecting what material to use; and you don't have to randomly fiddle with the shape or diameter of the pillar until the load holds. You can slap a pillar into the design and be able to predict that it'll hold the load (while not being overly costly in material use!), because "best practices."
