This article is similar to just that: useless clichés. I clicked to read more about the evidence backing up each item, but it's only in the footnotes? In other words, the footnotes are MUCH more interesting than the article.
Nevertheless, my subjective feeling is still that potentially strong arguments are being watered down by weaker arguments. I believe I would have responded better had these been split into separate articles.
Also, it's good to understand the limitations of the scientific process.
That is, you can formulate some hypothesis, and the job of evidence is to move probability mass around. I.e. when you have hypotheses A, B and C, each piece of evidence towards A makes you more sure of A, and less sure of B and C.
Weak evidence towards A makes you weakly more sure of A, and weakly less sure of B and C. But it's still better than choosing based on a coin flip.
However, you don't need to have strong evidence behind a technique for it to be worth trying – if the upside is high enough or the costs are low enough, it could still be worth it.
Well yeah but there's literally 1000's of books like that on Amazon - if yours isn't different, then why bother?
Uh, footnote citations for any advice are exactly what I expect when something says it's evidence-based.