[Karliss]

I can't defend tumbler. But with regards to turntable vs non-turntable (which if you are unlucky might default to tumbler), I have some ideas. In general I feel more comfortable with turntable mode (and have used it in Blender, game engines, and robotics software). When I started learning CAD I initially switched from the default trackball to turntable as well but after a while I switched back to trackball.

Turntable makes most sense when there is well defined and easily identifiable up direction like when you are working with 3d environments or humanoid models. With mechanical parts that you make in CAD software up direction isn't always as clear, you can easily forget where the up was if you don't pay attention to axis gizmo. Plenty of parts can have critical features on all sides, and the preferred "up" direction in most useful views for the part doesn't necessarily match with the up direction of whole assembly.

Turntable view has one downside which the article didn't mention - lack of "state independence". The behavior of mouse movement depends on the angle from which you looked at the start. This can result in situations where you meant to rotate around one axis but it rotates around different one or the rotation happens in opposite directions. Tumble and trackball don't have this problem as rotation isn't affected by global axis direction.

One more potential factor is use of 3d mice. I haven't used one myself, but I would assume that it somewhat avoids the most confusing aspects of non turntable modes. Thus in the best case reducing the need to improve default behavior for regular mice, in the worst case hacky 3d mice integration depending on the chosen rotation style which might brake if something other than tumbler is chosen (I really hope that no 3d software does this, but I lack the experience to confirm this).

This makes me wonder has any software tried dynamic turntable. That is turntable where the role of z axis is replaced by whichever axis was closer to up at the start of mouse drag. Always one of the 3 axis, not the local rotation up direction.