As I tried to express in the editorial, I guess I initially, and wrongly, had a tendency to see REPLACE as "general purpose" command, whenever restoring over an existing database, and so included it in code where it wasn't necessary. It struck me as a case where a better name might encourage a more cautious approach to its use, though I hardly intended the piece as a strident criticism of SQL Server.

If it turns out I'm the only one who was initially unaware of the "safety checks" that use of REPLACE disables then we can all move on :-).