Quasi-serious home baker here: think of those pieces of advice as possible inputs, instead of contradictory! How often you feed your starter, and how much water is included, are both factors you can use to control the final properties of the bread. For example, wetter starters tend to lean more lactic (milky) in flavor while drier ones tend more acetic (vinegary). Temperature, time, ingredients, kneading, etc. are all part of a big interconnected system that will have different results in your brand :)

I recommend checking out recipes and the forums on www.thefreshloaf.com. I also really recommend keeping some simple notes when you bake sourdough - what you did, how everything seemed, and how the bread came out. Over time, you’ll adjust and manipulate your own processes to get closer and closer to the bread you want.

Ken Forkish's book 'Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast' has led me to making some great breads, and every step is explained and has photos.

There's as many ways to make bread as there are bakers, and they are probably all good.

Here's a google slides deck I put together for how to make good-quality sourdough for a fraction of the effort that the "bread hipsters" go through:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UoH_BhRWUi0nnGj3uGp4...

Harold McGee's book "On Food and Cooking" has a chapter on bread making.

My favorite bread recipe is the No Knead Bread recipe that I saw in The NY Times many years back: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread

I've never had much success getting a sourdough starter up and running.

I paid $10 for this pre-Corona and have made several loaves so far. https://www.udemy.com/join/login-popup/?next=/course/sourdou...

This was posted in a HN comment not long ago: https://github.com/hendricius/the-bread-code/blob/master/bas...

I highly recommend books by Peter Reinhart. I prefer to bake with whole grains, so I have his "While Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor," but anything by him should be great. His work is definitely based in experience and the science of yeast and flour.

The bread I make most often, the simplest and most delicious one I've had in my life, comes from Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. So I can definitely second the recommendation of his books.