This is how that argument works. You come up with a bunch of logical-sounding explanations for why it must be this way, completely ignoring the material reality

This is how that argument works. You come up with a bunch of logical-sounding explanations for why it must be this way, completely ignoring the material reality that there are numerous working examples of other ways to do it. You keep everything as abstract as possible, and you hand-wave real-world counterexamples as sounding so extreme that they must be highly unusual and therefore irrelevant. And if someone presses the issue, you simply allow it to immediately devolve into bikeshedding, discussing the minutiae of that specific issue while ignoring the larger context. I'm not sure if there's a name for this style of argument, but it happens a lot, particularly in defenses of uniquely or primarily American phenomena.