I'm with you. I read this and I think, "ok, well, it's StackOverflow, and they're obviously a bunch of really smart people... but they're still doing it wrong"

I'm with you. I read this and I think, "ok, well, it's StackOverflow, and they're obviously a bunch of really smart people... but they're still doing it wrong". I've been doing Java for 20 years now, almost since there was Java. I've observed that most Java developers migrate toward "everything is static (i.e. global)". In fact, the abomination that is the Spring "framework" more or less requires it. I don't believe they do it for performance reasons, I believe they do it because you don't have to think much (up front) that way, and you can just kick the can down the road.