It's to keep the page weight balanced. Prose is considered to have neutral buoyancy, but code is naturally heavier and will tend to drag the page down if that isn't compensated by a lighter font. FWIW poetry can be so light, that it can require a very heavy font weight to keep it tethered to the page.
Cargo-cult programming is the act of copying something without understanding how it works or even whether or not it's required.
Typically it involves the ritual inclusion of code which does not need to exist because the author is copying something else they saw (or literally copying and pasting from Stack Overflow). The essence of the original article is the systematic _exclusion_ of code which does not need to exist -- that is the opposite of cargo-culting.
All of the guidelines exist for reasons which are well explained in the article. It's basically a guide that teaches you how to avoid cargo-culting.
If you're complaining that the guide encourages functional programming approaches, it's useful to admit that functional programming is an important capability of JavaScript (evidenced by the fact that functional utilities are built-in to the language).
You are not alone, but I just use bookmarks for that. Is using Pocket any different from that, e.g. does it save pages internally so if the original site goes down the page will still be available in Pocket?
Yes, Pocket saves a snapshot of the original, as well as a slimmed down version that's ideal for reading (akin to a "readability" version - maybe exactly that).
The mobile app also syncs the slimmed down versions so you can read them while offline. If you're using it for that, be sure to open the pocket app once in a while as it will stop syncing if you haven't opened the app for some [undetermined] amount of time.
There is an option in `about:config` for that -- `services.sync.sendTabToDevice.enabled`, disabled by default. Suggest you to enable it and try it out.
