It's not just him and is more of a general issue with frontend "thought leadership". Most of them went into it when they were relatively early in their career. There's no 1:1 relationship between years of experience and skill/knowledge of course, but if you pick any random FE influencer on Twitter, chances are they have less experience in the field than the staff engineer in your team. Unfortunately, it shows.
They do have a lot of good advice, and I don't want to throw the baby with the bathwater. But they do get it wrong pretty often, and it does waste hundreds or thousands of hours having to go internally in an engineering org telling people "No, it's not because you read it on the internet that it's true".
A much older equivalent example was how back in the days in the Microsoft world everyone would say you HAD to use stored procedures for performance and security, ignoring prepared statements, so a lot of big companies had internal onboarding classes that always started with debunking it. Kent added a ton of confusion and did a lot of disservice to the unit testing space (the library is good, the philosophy lacks a lot of nuance), some other folks are creating a lot of chaos around SPAs/client vs SSR (they started adding nuance to that more recently), and so on and so forth.
It's part of why the JS ecosystem keeps restarting from scratch over and over instead of building on top and creating vertical innovation. We get there eventually, but it's so much slower than it needs to be.
They do have a lot of good advice, and I don't want to throw the baby with the bathwater. But they do get it wrong pretty often, and it does waste hundreds or thousands of hours having to go internally in an engineering org telling people "No, it's not because you read it on the internet that it's true".
A much older equivalent example was how back in the days in the Microsoft world everyone would say you HAD to use stored procedures for performance and security, ignoring prepared statements, so a lot of big companies had internal onboarding classes that always started with debunking it. Kent added a ton of confusion and did a lot of disservice to the unit testing space (the library is good, the philosophy lacks a lot of nuance), some other folks are creating a lot of chaos around SPAs/client vs SSR (they started adding nuance to that more recently), and so on and so forth.
It's part of why the JS ecosystem keeps restarting from scratch over and over instead of building on top and creating vertical innovation. We get there eventually, but it's so much slower than it needs to be.