Some people can do macro tracking, others don't have the discipline for it. For those people, shifting to foods with a higher satiety to calorie ratio is a better strategy, or intermittent fasting, or cutting out a food group. As you said, what matters is CICO, not how you achieve it.

I like to compare it to programming. If you tell a C++ developer that their software should have good uptime, your advice here is the equivalent of saying "don't have memory leaks, null pointer dereferces or use-after-free". Yes, all true, but everyone know that. What we need are behaviour patterns like RAII, an extensive test suite, running those tests in valgrind/ASAN, etc. that actually help in a forward looking perspective achieve this goal of not making those mistakes which lead to poor performance.