What is most annoying as a newer hobbyist is that in the lack of hard science for most questions people when explaining something will talk as if all choices are about the dichotomy of healthy and dead trees.
Yes it’s obvious that if you forget to water your tree it will die. But then the topics become a lot more nuanced and the conversation does not.
Walter Pall says that if you are using free draining substrate you should water and liquid fertilize a lot (youtube, no citation provided). Walter Pall has amazing trees.
Michael Hagedorn says that overwatering a tree will cause weak roots for the summer and eventually kill the tree (p. 141, no citation provided). Michael Hagedorn has amazing trees.
Not only can masters not agree upon what will and will not kill a tree but we can’t quantify what is even “better”.
One of the problems is that we are working with living things (trees) There will always be individual differences in tolerance depending on circumstances. Add to that the huge range of climates, soil types, pots, species and care and the permutations become huge. Everyone will answer according to their experiences in their particular microclimate and the soils and cultural practices they use. These days anyone can be an instant expert without scrutiny thanks to the internet so many opinions are based on very little real experience and sometimes only on a single instance. More experienced growers will have a wider range of experience but still limited to their locality and practices.
It would become really complex to cover all the nuances without spending inordinate time typing answers and, even then, the answers would still be limited to that person's particular experiences rather than the full range of possibilities.
I think the best we can do is try to pick out trends in the multitude of answers, try to cross reference with similar climates and cultural practices, pick out some possibilities that seem reasonable then begin to test theories for ourselves.