Big fan of quiet. My home environment sits at about 30dB as measured by NIOSH’s sound level monitoring app, 32 during fridge cycle, 35dB when I have air conditioning running. In previous places I wasn’t able to control external noise as much and I had to use earplugs to focus; I tried half a dozen and found Etymotic’s earplugs to be by far the best (they claim to designed to reduce sound by approximately 20dB at all frequencies, which really feels miraculous compared to most ear plugs - they were at their best on long flights, where I could hear flight attendants and announcements just as easily with them in or out; if you are like me and more sensitive to noise than most people, these feel like a way to increase your threshold by 20dB, I can’t speak highly enough of them).

Two things in the article do jump out at me, though. One is that it talks about active noise cancellation - people do find this helpful, but there’s also a smaller community who find it causes problems for them, including worsening tinnitus. All else equal I would say it’s probably safer to reduce incoming sound as much as possible before using noise cancellation -it fundamentally involves “detecting noise and making more noise in a specific way such that the noises cancels out”. The theory is very sound (heh), I’m not suggesting it doesn’t cancel out, but there may be some very weird edge cases or subtle effects we don’t understand there.

The other thing is more of a nitpick, it mentions truck horns can be as loud as 150dB. That’s “standing 25 meters away from a jet engine at takeoff” level, like we’re talking “immediate rupture of eardrums” intensity here. I don’t doubt that you can buy truck horns that have “150dB” printed on their box, but I really doubt they’re actually that loud. And yes, looking at someone who’s done the research, only the very loudest of full size train horns that fill up a tank of compressed air get to just barely below 150dB - at 3ft away. At 100ft they all drop below 120dB. https://www.djdlabs.com/horns/