"It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.)
Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, there are some fat people that do change their behavior when presented with the truth; namely, quit eating foods with so many carbs, starches, and sugars.
In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight.
It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight.
Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.
Yes, hence "you have to balance your chemical equations", but we need to agree on what we're calling "eat" and "burn", here.
Burning 600 calories can just as well "work up an appetite" as it can "draw upon fat reserves".
We're used to thinking of weight loss as a behavioral problem withy metabolic symptoms ("he eats too much, so he got fat") whereas there's reason to consider it as a metabolic problem with behavioral symptoms ("the kind of food he eats signals to the body that fat should be created, so his body signals for him to eat more").