I am not finding anything suggestive about it, except repetition. Tax brackets awareness is important when you have more thing going on besides your w2. Especially for things that can't wait till tax return due date, like Roth conversion.
Or in a simpler use case, you know one year or the other will be a low income year, you sell the stock in that year.
Let's say you make $100,000 and a whopping $50,000 of it is RSUs and ESPPs. You've been very lucky and the stock portion is now worth $75,000. You sell. Your federal bracket has gone up by 2% and your California bracket has stayed the same. You will owe an additional $500 in taxes. This is just about the worst case scenario where you're not making that much for tech and your comp is exactly on the edge of a tax bracket and your comp is 50% equity and your company went up by 50% since vesting.
If the brackets are 10,000 @5%; 100,000 @10%, if you make 100,000 your first 10,000 is taxed at 5% and the next 90,000 is taxed at 10%.
Outside of long/short term gains, all things being equal, the timing is not especially important
See also:
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/new-york-st...
“However, New York also has a provision called tax-benefit recapture, which essentially turns its progressive tax into a flat tax for high earners, says Eric Bronnenkant, head of tax at Betterment and a certified public accountant.”
Everyone else, carry on. Nothing to see here.
It actually matters - or can matter, anyway - if you have any event pushing your income above $1M (if filing single) because of the change in deduction treatments.