I hope at least that we're in a phase of the profession where we're "discovering" the actual best practices.

There have been a lot of best practices that have been hypothesized over time: OOP, functional programming, unit testing, generative testing, formal analysis, strict typing, weak typing, etc.

And all these as-of-yet unfounded hypotheses are important! You've got to have a theory of how something works before you can prove that it does. Hopefully we can start to devise those proofs.