Nice write-up of this position, Erik. I'm of the same persuasion.
I've seen the same thing in the R world, between different dialects. I even wrote a piece comparing one approach (the “tidyverse”) to a kitchen full of gadgets — v. using a chef knife (data.table).
I also saw something…
Are dashboards dead? Kind of. Which I think makes them undead.
No, they're not dead: because people keep asking for them, and other people keep making them.
Yes, they're dead, because they rarely get used: most dashbaords are requested, made, published, and then never accessed again.
Users love the idea of dashboards: that they'll have control, and can get all kinds of insights. But most data are too complex to understand without analysis -- more than you cna do in an interactive dash. So to answer any serious question, you're back to ad-hoc reporting. Which is fine. Dashboards have their uses -- it's just far fewer uses than we sometimes imagine.
