I generally agree with your sentiments. There is, however, a relatively tricky balance to achieve when attempting to optimize athletic performance.

I think overtraining has become a bit of an epidemic among novice strength trainers, and "less is more" can be a helpful lesson to learn sooner than later... but extreme athletic results often involve extreme training methods. Injury is a line that is always (very) detrimental to cross, but not pushing yourself close to that line can result in you failing to reach full potential.

You could argue that optimizing for some athletic output is not a wise use of resources anyway, especially given the risks (and I might agree with you) But it just may take the most extreme training to produce the most extreme (and optimized) results.