I don’t see it as so different. Knuth was playing with bleeding edge tools to see how they could make beautiful documents, I’m sure peers told him plenty of times trying to run vector graphics through a PDP-10 wasn’t “carrying the tradition of…”
Knuth today is busy writing “Shock! Shock! Claude Opus is great at math” papers, not poo-pooing other with strange appeals to “tradition”
Knuth today is busy writing “Shock! Shock! Claude Opus is great at math” papers, not poo-pooing other with strange appeals to “tradition”