[JaggedNZ]

I don't get why people are picking on this statement when most of the "good" examples given have plenty of contrast and he then goes into many techniques to maintain good contrast.

Ironically the contrast rebellion site uses very similar techniques to create visual hierarchy, see slide 2 in particular.

[PeterisP]

That's the point, they do not have plenty of contrast. In the very first "good example", the phrase "Explore popular tourist destinations..." is needlessly difficult to read for me, and "28 reviews" might as well not be there; it's difficult to notice and I need to strain my eyes to read something with that low contrast. That picture is a clear example of something that's hard to use for many people, doesn't satisfy official accessibility standards, and should not be recommended.

Maybe you're younger or have better vision or a significantly different screen than I do, but then let that be a warning that either you need do usability testing on some settings where that particular picture looks not sufficiently 'contrasty' to you as well, or you need to write down the RGB values that this image has with a note "that's not enough contrast for general usage even if it looks ok to my eye".

[Silhouette]

I don't get why people are picking on this statement when most of the "good" examples given have plenty of contrast

Many of the "good" examples don't have sufficient contrast for a lot of people.

The first step to fixing a problem is understanding that it exists.

[busterarm]

Pretty sure the examples fail the test: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

Edit: 2.80:1

[imron]

It's not ironic at all, the contrast rebellion site doesn't use low contrast text except as an example to show how it's bad.