No, it actually was necessary, since we are seeing that problem.

The elephant metaphor is also a very common one, and used often in software development.

You seem to be addressing "attached files get lost", and address it with "never attach files, always link them".

As has been pointed out before, that's only half the problem. You get one set of users happy at the expense of the other set.

One of the newly created problem there would be "Hey! I keep editing this in GIMP, but my changes never show up". Another one is "I have a common image placed for background, and now my directory jumped from 100MB to 20GB and can't fit on my thumb drive any more". There are more, but I'll try to get those cleaned up and on the wiki now that I can see which ones are covered there and which are not.

Oh, and to explain what the "forest" problem actually is. The big-picture is more of "user gets confused by our handling of external media". When phrased that way, we see your preferred solution turns into "Make Inkscape never support external media", which now appears to be both a solution and a problem and no longer merely a solution.

Also once the big-picture is seen in that phrasing, we can see that we need to support CSS files, ICC files, Palette files, *other* SVG files and many others, and not just have a solution for images and only images.

I think the 'meta-fix' here is to try to address "help users not be surprised by behavior with external assets." For one set of users, losing attached files is surprising. However, for another set of users having SVG files bloat hugely, lose shared results, etc. is surprising. Let's address a single unified solution that will solve the whole problem, not one that fixes part at the cost of another part.