Yes, if you're giving the actual date, the relative time from the time of utterance is redundant, and if you aren't, it's misleading because you can't make sens

Yes, if you're giving the actual date, the relative time from the time of utterance is redundant, and if you aren't, it's misleading because you can't make sense of it without knowing the date of utterance. I don't have access to e.g. the AP or NYT style guides but I'll believe you that they ban temporal adverbs (which strikes me as excessive zeal; really, you can't say "earlier"?); I'm not sure why you think this is significant, since those guides are formulated with specific kinds of writing in mind, and the author is talking about fiction, in which it's totally ok to just say that something happened yesterday. And, of course, different institutions can have all sorts of crazy, hard-to-justify crap in their style guides---why not---house style can be idiosyncratic. The linked author is attempting to make a case to others; she isn't saying "here's how I do it" and she isn't representing a house style. ETA in a quick search I was unable to find anything about temporal adverbs in particular in the Chicago Manual of Style.