That's the thing. The rationale sounds good. But where is the evidence? The code base followed all the rules, yet it was worse and had more bugs than any non-c

That's the thing. The rationale sounds good. But where is the evidence? The code base followed all the rules, yet it was worse and had more bugs than any non-conformant code base I have ever seen. And teaching beginners to strictly follow rules instead of mercilessly rewriting and testing code until it is sufficiently clean and correct is the worst you can do, IMHO.