Comment by wtallis

It's fine advice. The wear of writing 1GB of zeros can and should be ignored. It's insignificant. And the drive's spare area is only relevant if you're trying to thoroughly wipe sensitive information from a device before disposing of it. But right now we're just trying to make a device appear functionally empty so that we can re-install an OS without remnants of any previous installation getting in the way. This does not require the (sometimes dubious) security assurances of a secure erase command.