Frankly, the attitude wouldn't bother me so much if what he was posting made sense in the real world.  But it just doesn't.  Making identifier values character(10) simply because you never do math on them?  That's just terrible given the huge performance implications.  I'll admit, I too think identity values are vastly overused by most developers, particularly as "default" clustering keys (when such a thing should not exist), but they do have their proper place.