Preface: I don't argue either in favour or against homebrew here. From the limited number of times I had to set up homebrew, I noticed the official method tell

Preface: I don't argue either in favour or against homebrew here. From the limited number of times I had to set up homebrew, I noticed the official method tells the user to take over /usr/local/ (via a `sudo chown ...`). They could have made the process use ~/.local, but don't. And because of the official position on using /usr/local/, lots of homebrew formulae assume and depend on /usr/local/. Without taking the side of the "unix traditionalists" you speak of, I can understand their point. Homebrew doesn't have to take over a system location for user-account specific software, but it does.