The existence of "best practices" that are so detailed can become a real pain at times. While they provide a good checklist of potential issue to take care with, there are plenty of cases where a specific situations would be greatly improved by some changes (while still addressing the checklist) but the mid-experience developers will dogmatically drag down any architecture into the same rigid structure.
I honestly don't know how so often now smart and somewhat experienced people don't have any confidence in their abilities over some random list on the internet, especially since when I forced them to think for themselves they do come up with improved approaches.
Personally, I've seen much more of the opposite - clever devs shrugging off good advice without understanding it, just thinking "it doesn't apply to me"
But I think you're right about the more mid-experience developers. It would be nice if things like the 12factor specification weren't driven by Heroku's desire to make people feel like their approach is right, but rather, had a more nuanced approach like "these are our guidelines, we're confident in most cases they should be followed. If you fully understand a guideline and have a reason (driven by the bottom line, not subjective tastes, and not mentioned by us) to avoid following that guideline, do not follow it"
I honestly don't know how so often now smart and somewhat experienced people don't have any confidence in their abilities over some random list on the internet, especially since when I forced them to think for themselves they do come up with improved approaches.