I thought much more highly of him when I didn't work in games and I was a web developer. Now that I work in games I don't think very highly of him. He's an uncompromising fundamentalist that sends would-be game developers down impossibly unproductive paths of worrying about minutia that will never matter to their projects before they've ever built their first game. He's famous for being a rude guest in both academia and in conferences. He's basically the equivalent of someone that says that you should NEVER use node because node_modules gets big and if you're writing a server it should be in Rust and if it isn't you're bad and you should feel bad. His worldview does not at all take into account the differing problems faced by differing people, having differing access to resources and differing budgets and time constraints. He is _only_ concerned with how you should work if you have no deadlines, an essentially unlimited runway, and your most important concern is resource efficiency. For most games projects, the production bottleneck is not CPU or GPU efficiency: it's the cost of art production. What he has to say is, for the vast, vast majority of people, not applicable. He is, essentially, an apex predator of confirmation bias.

The thing about Jonathan Blow is that for a lot of people, he's the first graphics-focused outspoken programmer that they run into and so they think he's some form of singular genius. He isn't.