Checklists and acronyms help some people, so more power to them. But I think the central observation of most of the anti-cargo-cult articles boils down to a simple maxim of "don't use a technology unless you understand what it's bad at".
There are very few technologies that can reasonably be thought of as strict upgrades, and the few that do exist (i.e. MySQL to Postgres) tend to be incremental enough that switching rarely justifies the migration costs. Instead, many solve one or two exceptionally dramatic problems (gargantuan datasets, huge write volumes, partition tolerant master-master replication, etc.) and are willing to make equally dramatic tradeoffs to achieve it. Saying Technology X is good at Problem Y is only half the story.
In my own practice I've found that forcing myself to stop and explicitly enumerate both the pros and cons of a new technology is usually enough to get my professional intuition to kick in. And 99 times out of 100 it tells me to just use boring old SQL and move on.
There are very few technologies that can reasonably be thought of as strict upgrades, and the few that do exist (i.e. MySQL to Postgres) tend to be incremental enough that switching rarely justifies the migration costs. Instead, many solve one or two exceptionally dramatic problems (gargantuan datasets, huge write volumes, partition tolerant master-master replication, etc.) and are willing to make equally dramatic tradeoffs to achieve it. Saying Technology X is good at Problem Y is only half the story.
In my own practice I've found that forcing myself to stop and explicitly enumerate both the pros and cons of a new technology is usually enough to get my professional intuition to kick in. And 99 times out of 100 it tells me to just use boring old SQL and move on.