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This just isn't true. Try listening to any deep ambient, and you'll be hearing (a) instruments with filter cutoffs in use (b) chords (c) no percussion (d) no lead. Again, Roach's "Mystic Chords and Sacred Spaces" is as good a place to start as any.

What is true in ambient is that you frequently do not want the third in the chords, because it makes the chords "too obvious". A lot of drone music involves a variety of chords with the third omitted.

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IMO "chords" is the wrong word to use here, because chords are a fingering technique for polyphonic instruments. (So, guitar, piano, accordion, and ... that's it?)

What I mean is voice leading and counterpoint - once you have a filter sweep as an instrument you now need to deliberately avoid all that when composing.

People act as if these Western music theory concepts are grand universals, but they're really just useful conventions for the particular music instruments common at the time. They're not even universal for all of Western music; when the instruments evolved so did the conventions and the "theory".

"Chords" is definitely the wrong word to use if you mean "voice leading and counterpoint" or more generally, western tonal music theory. And yes, that theory is highly localized in both time and space.

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