[bane]

The problem with style guides is that they're often conflated by both the reader and the writer as rulebooks. They should instead be used as sources of writing ideas, or communication improvement aids -- to target writing for specific audiences.

English can be assembled in all kinds of wonderful and creative ways. The best writing is when you coin a phrase that style guides insist shouldn't work, but communicate something beautifully. "Most excellent", for example, is a wonderful example. It's concise, it's nonstandard and it's brings about vivid imagery of two time travelling wanna be rock stars.

The worst style guides are outright wrong. "very afraid" doesn't mean "terrified". How lame does "be afraid, be very afraid" sounds as "be afraid, be terrified"? "very poor" doesn't mean "destitute", I grew up very poor, but we were never destitute. Being "very rude" is has a very different connotation from "vulgar". This guide takes finely graded connotations and turns them into extremes.

It's worth using it to double check if what you mean is the extreme, and you accidentally used something else, but beyond that, a search and replace of "very <word>" with any of these suggestions is likely to make your writing worse.

English can be beautiful, enjoy it.