"But plenty of people have permanently damaged their knees by consistently running without getting advice on how best to do it."

The people who read running boards all the time roll their eyes at stuff like this. Saying that running will hurt your knees is the running equivalent of "The GPL will infect your codebase." It's not true, but it sounds scary.

Usually, if you ask runners how to run, they will say something like, "It's not that complicated. Run more miles, slowly."

For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/wi8zq/want_an_easy...