I'm old enough to remember that the preference for prime lenses over zoom was because early zoom lenses were crap. Even now, (mumble) decades later, intellectually knowing that thanks to improvements in glass and cadcam manufacturing techniques, today's zooms are much better than what I grew up with, I still don't use them.

And I've been listening to the whole crop-no crop thing most of my life too. BUt ECB didn't crop! people say (though he sometimes did). I try to shoot to get it 'in camera' as close as I can to what I want, but as the article says, sometimes you just can't. You still get to choose what your final image is going to be. And that's the thing about 'rules' and 'advice'--they're just some guidelines, things to think about, but they're highly contextual, depending on the situation.