Not baloney. Someone who thinks they can decide what’s important about a production, not the production designer or manager, is likely to draw the line at the wrong place. Someone who faithfully implements detailed instructions is more trustworthy. A quick way to check if that’s the case helps to determine which kind of person oversaw the work.

I used to work as a developer at creative agencies and saw this all the time. There were developers who had a hard time believing that they should implement designs to the pixel because they thought a bit of padding didn’t matter so long as they got the important items right. They were almost always the ones who ended up missing important details (copy, working forms, performant databases etc.)