As a counterpoint to that, in some cases technology is changing so rapidly that things which were best practices no longer are and vice versa. Things that we take for granted now, like CI/CD, were not even technically possible 20 years ago. If people weren't constantly challenging best practices as new technology came out then we'd still be pushing our CRs through change acceptance boards.
Or think about "the cloud," "infrastructure as code," "immutable infrastructure," all that stuff that's considered best practices now couldn't have even been conceived of when we were spinning up new servers by driving to the data center and dropping a new 1U in the rack.
Good point, absolutely! The line is really thin between industry changing stuff (CI, cloud, distributed version control, type systems that don't suck, etc) and reinventing the wheel through arrogance or just not knowing any better (yet another testing framework, screwing up some well studied patterns :cough Java Optionals cough:)
The graybeards among us might chuckle at the thought of calling it "distributed version control" when the CI system requires a centralized copy of the repository acting as a source of truth in order to work.
CI systems only need the "centralized" copy as a reference point of what the current master is. Everyone gets their own entire copy of that repository though. If the truth suddenly changes it's known. I also know that if the copy in the "centralized" matches my own then the CI is also running exactly my code. If the centralized machine fails I can fail it over to any copy on any machine. That seems pretty distributed to me as compared to the original "distributed" version: e-mailing source code around. Version control like SVN and CVS were centralized in that me having a copy of the source and you having a copy of the source indicated nothing about whose version is correct. Moreover a failure of the central spot in the system is fatal unless you had backups as a form of pseudo-distribution whereas in today's version control a failure on any one machine is irrelevant to the preservation of the system.
Or think about "the cloud," "infrastructure as code," "immutable infrastructure," all that stuff that's considered best practices now couldn't have even been conceived of when we were spinning up new servers by driving to the data center and dropping a new 1U in the rack.