I often wonder half amused, "What Would Dijkstra Do?", every time I see the phrase referenced. It's almost like harmful has lost meaning because of the complexity of the systems of which to it refers.

Everything modern is ridiculously complex, even if it looks simple. You can't state that a single thing in a complex system is harmful without forcing yourself to re-evaluate the entire construction of the rest of the system, in which case you can either (A) determine that there is no alternative solution, or (B) the system must be altered in some other way (in which case now multiple things are equivalently harmful. Since (B) happens so frequently, this means many parts of every system are harmful precisely because the system isn't perfect yet (and every part can be minorly adjusted so long as other parts of the system are adjusted - and this latter part is never discussed (probably because the complexity involved is actually complex and someone else would be like 'dude, that's also harmful - your solution has side effects'))).

If it was easy to implement new things people would do that instead of complaining. There's a good reason things are the way they are and not some other way.

wiki article on the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone

There was a small discussion on the issue previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844117

"Maybe if I use that famous phrase from the title of a famous document, people will take my sloppy draft more seriously."

We need to buckle the trend and write more 'considered beneficial' posts!

Partially this is already happening with <whatever>-awesome curated Github repos.

Now? The "considered harmful" essay is probably one of the most important early contributions to the field of computer science.

Everytime I read the "considered harmful" phrase, I ask myself "Considered harmful, by whom?"

Even Dijkstra didn't use it - the title was added by the editor.