A lot of people have been praising this "estimates based on data and rigorous planning" for decades. Steve McConnell wrote a whole book about it (Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art).

It works only very special circumstances: when the task can be very well defined because it has been done a lot of times before and the people doing the task are very experienced on it.

But the caveat is that if you are doing such a task you're not really doing any innovation at all. Actually, if it is so well defined and trivial it should probably already have been automated.

True innovation must have a lot of unknowns, it isn't innovation without it.