Firstly, you are mistaken about the Crystal Goblet, and maybe, in this case, Butterick is doing the same. It is predicated on the assumption that typography doe

Firstly, you are mistaken about the Crystal Goblet, and maybe, in this case, Butterick is doing the same. It is predicated on the assumption that typography does have an effect; Warde goes on to claim that it is at its best when it is not ostentatiously drawing attention to itself. Secondly, you are attempting to create a straw man by insisting that the Crystal Goblet must be (mis)read as an absolute manifesto, but if you need to do that, you don't really have much of an argument against it (I don't think Butterick is making this error.) Thirdly, you are waffling over whether Butterick is claiming a significant difference between himself and Warde. By the fifth paragraph, you are tentatively acknowledging that Butterick is (probably) making such a claim, which is wise, because otherwise your argument would quite clearly just be pointlessly and tiresomely pedantic (something that I would not accuse Butterick of being.) Immediately after that, however, you resume being pedantic by bringing back the straw man, saying that it would not matter if Butterick was not claiming a significant difference because (your misunderstanding of) Warde's position is that it is an absolutist one. This sort of having-your-cake-and-eating-it sometimes goes by the name of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Maybe we should just go back to my original point: what, of significance, is a typical work of prose missing before it is typeset? you might actually be able to make a case for mathematics, some poetry and possibly medieval illuminated manuscripts, but these are corner cases in comparison to the global corpus of prose.