As a layman I'm wondering whether CICO, as a grossly simplified model, is more useful when a person is very overweight/obese than when they are closer to normal

As a layman I'm wondering whether CICO, as a grossly simplified model, is more useful when a person is very overweight/obese than when they are closer to normal weight. When you want/need to loose, say, >40 pounds it would be plausible that an error of 200-300 calories doesn't matter as much because most likely your excess intake is beyond that. Your health would improve considerably by following the simple but inaccurate model instead of doing nothing. As your weight goes down CICO becomes less and less useful and you need to switch to a more accurate model. I'm not an expert and can only talk from personal experience (aka unscientific anecdotes) of me and my social circle.