This is an outrageously reductive meme that has long outstripped its actual usefulness and needs to die. The axis and scale should represent the useful range of values. For example, if your body temperature in Fahrenheit moves more than 5 degrees in either direction, you're having a medical emergency, but on a graph that starts from zero, this would barely be visible. Plotting body temperature from zero would conceal much more than it reveals, which is the opposite of what dataviz is supposed to do.
The only reasonable zero-value for temperature is 0K, which unfortunately leads to unreadable graphs. (All other temperature scales are completely arbitrary.) So for the specific case of temperatures, it is in fact completely reasonable to have a nonzero axis. But most graphs are not temperatures.
This is an outrageously reductive meme that has long outstripped its actual usefulness and needs to die. The axis and scale should represent the useful range of values. For example, if your body temperature in Fahrenheit moves more than 5 degrees in either direction, you're having a medical emergency, but on a graph that starts from zero, this would barely be visible. Plotting body temperature from zero would conceal much more than it reveals, which is the opposite of what dataviz is supposed to do.