> and the other side just pointed at the book

One of the most infuriating categories of engineers to work with is the one who's always citing books in code review. It's effectively effort amplification as a defense mechanism, now instead of having a discussion with you I have to go read a book first. No thanks.

I do not give a shit that this practice is in a book written by some well respected whoever, if you can't explain why you think it applies here then I'm not going to approve your PR.

Yeah, and any of these philosophies are always terrible when you take them to their limit. The ideas are always good in principle and built on a nugget of truth, it's when people take it as gospel I have a problem. If they just read the book and drew inspiration for alternative, possibly better, coding styles and could argue their case that's unequivocally good.