Years passed, experience and nuance decayed the strength of my opinions, and it was fascinating to realize -- even where I was perfectly right, I was mostly only right accidentally, my arguments were just a story to fit the narrative, never really fully internalized.
But I suppose if you could go back and do it differently, you would, so I can appreciate why you consider this to be a mistake.
Flip side of the coin: having strong opinions but being open to discussion and reconsidering your position in the face of new evidence is a great way to earn respect.
Oh my god this is so true for me too. I had really strong opinions on so many things that if I put aside my ignorant opinions about them, I / my life / career would have been better. Strong opinions I had included I don't need to use OOP in PHP (had to until too late), Bitcoin is worthless who would ever invest in it (had to until too late / costly), NoSQL is just useless, what's so wrong with PostgreSQL (had to swallow my words until I used Redis), so many more. The current opinion I am holding is "who needs Kubernetes" when individual VMs do the trick and slowly but steadily I feel these words will be regretted too.
Now I assume I’m right until someone proves me false.
Still willing to accept other people’s opinions when I have no clue, but evidence seems to point towards my gut feeling being a better indicator of viability than whatever method those other people use.