The author neglects to mention any of the use cases where "dd" really is the best alternative. Such as when you need to copy a bootloader from an existing image without damaging your partition table:
# My partition table is in sector 0 and my Linux partition starts at sector 62500
How do you make "cat" seek 512 bytes into its stdout before writing? You can't. And even if you used a temporary file, I think the above is better than a pipeline of "head" and "tail" with uses of $(()) to convert from sector to byte units.
Once you have learned to use the tool in such situations a few times, you mentally start to associate it with "disk operations". So you start to use it also in simpler situations where simpler tools would be sufficient. You start teaching its use to others. I don't think it's that strange, or bad in any way.
A generous interpretation of the title might be that the author is only writing about those for whom dd is so ingrained in their style that they use it where another command would be more natural, hence they're "cultish".
# My partition table is in sector 0 and my Linux partition starts at sector 62500
dd if=random-linux-image.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=512 count=62499 seek=1 skip=1
How do you make "cat" seek 512 bytes into its stdout before writing? You can't. And even if you used a temporary file, I think the above is better than a pipeline of "head" and "tail" with uses of $(()) to convert from sector to byte units.
Once you have learned to use the tool in such situations a few times, you mentally start to associate it with "disk operations". So you start to use it also in simpler situations where simpler tools would be sufficient. You start teaching its use to others. I don't think it's that strange, or bad in any way.