[jgon]

This analogy doesn't work because programming in "industry" has been like the MMA since day 1 in the sense that you have always had to "test your skills" and make something that people wanted and compete with other products. In the martial arts world a bunch of different martial arts just completely went without full-contact sparring/competition and instead built up a bunch of different rules and scenarios around how they were "too deadly to be done in practice". This is the bullshit that MMA exposed, and its interesting to note that the two practices in the comment you're responding to, judo and karate, have had a long history of being practiced "for real" in the gym and in competition and thus have spawned a long line of highly successful MMA competitors.

The analogy also doesn't work because BJJ isn't some silver bullet. What people discovered is that the first M in MMA is actually the important part and if all you know is BJJ you're going to get starched by a boxer with a sprawl, or more likely a wrestler with a modicum of submission knowledge, who will never let you get to the floor in the first place, and instead just grind you out.

So just like the question "what is the best martial art" currently has no answer outside of "you need a mix of striking and grappling not just one thing", there is no answer to "What is the best programming style" outside of "think about the problem you have at hand and crib on examples and knowledge from other people who have solved a similar problem". This "unfortunately" points to boring industry standard tools, like Java, C/C++, Javascript, RDBMSs, IDEs, Linux etc, etc. Probably some newer stuff like Rust and React as well. And note that answer isn't one specific technology, like MMA its a bag of different tools you combine.