Where Tufte (and others like him) is concerned, I try to remember the maxim Do not follow in the footsteps of the sages. Seek what they sought.

Slavishly reproducing his methodology ignores everything we've learned since then. On the other hand, for those new to the field, reading about his work and understanding what he was trying to accomplish with the tools available at the time can open our eyes to new ways of thinking.

(As an aside, this same maxim has also helped me with things like programming tools. We don't need to use Lisp or Smalltalk for everything, but we can learn a lot from these languages, and especially from what their creators and proponents were trying to achieve with them.)