• Things get badged up as best practice thus sullying the term best practice in the same way that certain practices get badged as agile while actually being bodge it and wing it thus sullying the term agile.

    The context in which something is best practice is important.

    For example, "for integers use the smallest integer data type possible" is open to abuse.

    "Use the smallest data type that covers the possible use cases" is better, though not a panacea.

    To my mind the term "best practice" is intended to be "preferred common usage" to help newbies from straying into dangerous territory without appropriate skills/awareness. Stage one is learning the rules. Stage two is learning the caveats to those rules. Stage three is discovering new rules/caveats.