But as I got more senior, when asked by less experienced developers the best way to do something, my answers tended to increasingly start with: "Well, it depends...".
And that's the thing, there is no universal best practice for everything, there are solutions which are more often than not good enough, but as all solutions tend to be a trade off favouring a particular scenario over another, sometimes they're also highly inappropriate to the particular circumstances.
Another term for someone trying to blindly apply supposed best practices is "cargo culting".
In summary, there is lot's nuance to software development and the particular circumstances it's being applied to meaning that you need to understand the trade offs of particular solutions to see which one makes the most sense for a particular situation.