Creating objects in “empty” states is lazy programming. The point of references is to guarantee an object exists. But don’t pretend an object exists just to satisfy the reference. Rethink your code to take advantage of the guarantee.
Another thing you won't find in this book is the C++ Gospel, the One True Path to perfect C++ software. Each of the Items in this book provides guidance on how to develop better designs, how to avoid common problems, or how to achieve greater efficiency, but none of the Items is universally applicable. ...
If you follow all the guidelines all the time, you are unlikely to fall into the most common traps surrounding C++, but guidelines, by their nature, have exceptions. That's why each Item has an explanation. The explanations are the most important part of the book.
Scott Meyers - Effective C++
The problem is not "Effective X" books. The problems is people treating these rules in these books as dogma.
The one thing that does never work is blindly following dogma.
You put a bunch of stuff in a book and people are going to copy the stuff from the book into their programs. Bits of front-matter don't matter. Consider the GoF book and the havoc that mindless repetition of design patterns creates.
The alternative would be to not ever improve our knowledge.
Rant: Personally since working on my game engine in C, my architecture has become so much simpler, I can easily avoid unnecessecary allocations. My code is much more coherent. Aspect-oriented - which is not at all OO spirit, since OO encourages (trying) to bundle things in self-contained packages.
Yes, that seems hard to believe, since there is so much bad C code out there. With allocations, strings, file system operations etc. all over the place, just as in typical OO code. (Of course some things are really hard to do in C vs C++. The point is forcing myself to have a good architecture and avoid having to make many meaningless decisions).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93component%E2%80...
I consider this to be important to code maintainability at least as much as to performance.