This isn't a safety note, it's a warning not to use flags that you don't fully understand.
and how many people were told to do chown -R from stackoverflow?
Corollary: Learn to RTFM.
Unless you've went out of your way to avoiding installing the documentation (man pages, etc.), all the answers you need (well, most of them) are right there on your own system.
Fortunately, developers are never put under unreasonable deadlines while being evaluated by how many JIRA tickets they close and instead are always given as much time as they need to ensure that they understand all the nuances of the entire stack all the way down to the subtle behaviors of the operating system.
The logical conclusion of your argument is to ditch command line tools altogether and use graphical tools; at least then you can exhaustively review every checkbox and dropdown etc. before you click "go". Which is ironic, because from the tone of your comment I suspect you're actually a strong adherent to command line tools.
I can say I've never heard of -h/-H and never thought much about symlinks vs. chmod and I never had a problem with it because I've never thought that a symlink can have its own permission (I didn't even know such systems exist).
So for me the default of -H is fine.