alt Hacker NewsThere are best or accepted practices in every field.
And in every field they work well for the average case, but are rarely the best fit for that specific scenario. And in some rare scenarios, doing the opposite is the solution that fits best the individual/team/project.
The interesting takeaway here is that crowd wisdom should be given weight and probably defaulted if we want to turn off our brains. But if you turn on your brain you will unavoidably see the many cracks that those solutions bring for your specific problem.
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Having a solid product that solves a problem well can be orthogonal to how well a codebase lends itself to readability, learning curve, and efficiently ramping up new developers on a project.
Just because you succeed at one says nothing about other practical and important metrics.
That's why I hate them being called "best" practices. No, they aren't the best practices, they are the mediocre practices. Sometimes, that's a good thing (you don't want to have the really bad results!), but if you aim for the very best practices, all of them will hold you back. It's basically a tradeoff, sacrificing efficiency / good performance in exchange for maintainability, consistency and reliability.