Depends on the dishwasher.

A quick rinse only decreases chances of issues.

Also, waiting 3 years to load the dishwasher until full to run it will make food hard on it.

Have to choose the poison.

These dishwasher discussions to me always are a bit frustrating because so much of it depends.

Even the article has this little caveat that's not so little: you don't need to prerinse unless it involves protein, which is actually a lot of dishes potentially.

It depends on how long it takes you to load the dishwasher, as you're pointing out, and all sorts of other things.

I've also noticed that consumer outlets frequently complain that people don't clean out their filter enough, which damages the dishwasher, but that filter is probably clogged by stuff that doesn't get rinsed off the dishes.

We have a dishwasher, we use it, but I have always kind of felt like dishwashers were the one appliance I could live without (and have for years at times, even when we owned one). If there's lots of dishes or lots of people, they're useful for us. But we don't have that many people over usually, I can't put certain things in ours because they don't get clean, there's always things I don't want to or can't put in the dishwasher, so I end up washing things with them, there's things that I will have to pull out anyway or run a very empty load, and so forth and so on.

I guess I feel like they're useful to have around but other appliances (range, fridge, washing machine) have been much much much much more important to me.