PCBs, copper pours, ground planes, and you

I don't see it mentioned here but I may be too much of an amateur but I use copper pours because it reduces the work my ferric chloride has to do when I'm making prototypes. Having a mask cover all unused areas on the board vs. letting the acid eat through it seems like a waste.

Your logic is definitely sound for a hobbyist or prototyped, but the copper dissolved off a board in a commercial setting is recycled.

The article misses the real reason why pours were uncommon in the 80s, which is that people had to actually “tape out” the whole thing, and it was very annoying to do pours that way.

Lots of manufacturers will add copper pours to your board unless you explicitly tell them not to, for electroplating reasons. Here's a link to a JLCPCB post about it: https://jlcpcb.com/blog/the-importance-of-copper-pour-in-emp...