It's not terrible advice. You mentioned SICP, funny thing is, years ago when I put someone on to SICP, next thing you know in our production code we started getting these weird ass recursive functions..... Also had similar issues with Design Patterns, all kinds of overly engineered class structures started popping up. On the side of ALAN, I used to work with guy who did a lot of machine vision research, he coded everything the way he knew how for years, and he was super productive doing it. I didn't really like the code. But he got stuff done. Having said all that, learning stuff is still good, practicing stuff on non critical code is the next step.

Taking some lessons from BJJ ( Brazillian Jiujitsu ), when you compete, you go in with your A game, the things you have practiced, the things you have made work over and over again, your high percentage moves. Over time, you add things into your A game as you gain experience in making those techniques work. You may occassionally find yourself in an odd situation which some "new" technique is screaming to be used and you might try it out. But usually, when you encounter a situation you don't really know, you start working at getting the problem to change to something you do know, then throw your A game at it.

I think programmers should understand what their A game is.