That is the dirty little secret of keto—higher fat diets tends to trigger the satiety faster and people tend to eat less calories because of it. People assume keto means things like “all you can eat bacon” and think that people on keto are packing away 10k calories a day of bacon. Try and eat a pound of bacon...bet you can’t.

My calories were cut in half when I first moved to keto, and I never ever felt hungry which is way way different than every other calorie restricted diet I ever attempted.

Your comment near the end feels like you're facing information that heavily conflicts with what you're used to hearing and are instinctively reaching for the middle ground fallacy. I've yet to hear about someone on the keto diet getting anywhere near dangerously low weight. Most people just complain about plateauing at a slightly higher weight than desired before they start putting any effort into eating before they feel full.

Am I? That is interesting as I know others managing their T2 this way. Actually I know more people managing their diabetes this way than any other dietary strategy (short of the tried and true eat whatever in moderation and push insulin to counteract it approach which is basically just resigning yourself to the inevitability of the disease). It could just be that it’s a new enough strategy that it hasn’t received the widespread medical adoption yet in your area. My own doctor advised against me doing it until he saw what it did for me. Then, coincidentally that is right around when the ADA added the low carb dietary strategy to their approval list and now the medical office advises the approach as one they know can create some success. I’d say anyone using diet only to control T2 is an outlier, but using keto or low carb for those folks using diet alone…it’s likely moving to becoming the majority.

As to your second point, yes extreme to extreme, gotcha and thanks for the punctuation on the point too—but that has little to do with the fact that if your body cannot effectively process excess glucose you either need more insulin to handle it, some way to make your insulin more effective, or you need a strategy that creates less glucose that your body needs to handle. Whether you are 170lbs overweight or 1lb overweight and T2 if you limit carb intake (and protein to a degree) you can solve the excess glucose problem.

I’d also argue that considering just about every foodstuff in my local supermarket has some form of keto alternative marketed alongside it and for at least the last 4 years, we have moved away from extreme and into the realm of yet another mainstream eating strategy that has been adopted by the public.