>But, if you have evidence that these are more successful than alternatives, I'm game. Where is the evidence? For that matter, what are the alternatives?

The strategies (or archetypes) are just 4 different ways to achieve a focus period for doing some work.

Regardless of which you pick, the core thing you look for in each (and possibly others, but those seem quite an exhaustive list of such strategies, or at least the major ones) is focused work.

I don't think we need any evidence besides the mountains of empirical evidence that focused work is better - not any more than people needed evidence that we should breath before we learned about oxygen and the workings of the lungs...

Is there mountains of evidence? Seems like mountains of anecdotes. Most famous work was work for hire. And yet we don't hear how getting paid for what you produce helps you produce. Often we hear the opposite.