The fact that everyone says the meme is dead, but in this small thread there are 5 different people posting how to exit, and none of them are the same says there is still pretty good substance behind that meme.

I think we're all kind of implicitly acknowledging the truth of the meme. I mean that was definitely a conscious part of my own comment.

I feel like the default behavior should be to not write unless changes have been made. I may be misunderstanding here, but what would be getting written if nothing's been changed?

It would overwrite changes made by external programs.

Metadata about the file like modification time.