Statistically, you’re the lucky one here. To see just ONE of these kinds of people is fairly rare: to see tons is incredibly so.
Is it possible that you’re employing a high degree of hyperbolic speech such that it’s muddying the dialogue? We may be referring to entirely different unicorns here.
The answer to that question is always going to be individual. For personal relevance, I rather ask myself “what is too much volume?”. For me, that will always be whatever I’m not recovering from to be adapted to by the time the next session comes around. I’m very much in the camp of doing the smallest amount that will illicit the most gains. That means that if there’s ever a roadblock, upping the volume can be one of the many tools in my arsenal I can use to progress. As long as I’m progressing somehow, I don’t care how I’m doing it. Being someone that mostly stays away from “high volume” training though, I’m sure there is some real potential there for me for and it’s assumed newness to my body as a stimulus.
I mean possibly, but I can only speak anecdotally on this. I live in a small town with a drug issue beyond just steroids and there are many people that are, for lack of a better term, intellectually challenged. These people have no coach, no idea, no plan, no basic lifts, no intensity, no nutritional knowledge, no consistency, bad sleep, bad skin, bad lifestyle choices and to bring back to the original point, bad advice. This group of people haven’t ended up with these half-decent bodies through above-average genetics or knowledge, and their words have little value to me. Even for those that didn’t hop on cycle right away, it was the end of their novice gains that put the idea in their head in the first place because they either didn’t have the patience to figure things out, or were continually disappointed in what little progress they were making.
The unicorn may be the level of body we’re talking about. To get to a certain level, of course you’ve got to have learnt some shit.
This went from “amazing progress” to “half-decent”. That is QUITE a delta.
You can absolutely get a half-decent body with poor training and the help of drugs.
But amazing? I don’t see that happening.
I agree with the author. I started more serious but still “average guy” lifting in my 30s and spent a lot of time reading and watching videos on proper form, especially the squat/deadlift/overhead press/bench press. At one point, I became so obsessed with getting my form “perfect” on these lifts that I noticed I was not progressing. I stopped thinking so much and just let my body complete the basic queues and found I was able to continue my progress. I have come to the conclusion for my own progress that certain queues are important for average guys to follow but trying to be “perfect” is more for a high level lifter looking to squeeze a few more pounds out. For example,in the high bar squat, I was at one point obsessed with how vertical my back was through the entire motion that I stopped focusing on progress until I came to the conclusion that as long as my hips didn’t shoot up, my chest stayed high and I drove my legs through the floor, no one was going to be standing beside me measuring my back angle to make sure it was a full 90 degrees, and as long as my quads were getting the work and I was adding weight without sacrificing those basic queues, I was getting better at the lift.
A half-decent body can be amazing progress depending on where you started…
More than you’re conditioned to doing! 
I say that half jokingly, but the other half isn’t.
I hate to sound old, sooo…
When I was cutting trees we’d take down one or maybe several a day. By dragging them out of what ever yard they were in (up steps, hills, down, what ever it took) and throwing them through the chipper, then logs into the truck.
So, roughly 3 trucks, sometimes 4, at about 20k lbs. each.
Then I’d go lift.
So occasionally we’d get a guy who wanted to be a bodybuilder, kind of get jacked type dude. They’d start out all fired up and I’d tell them to chill, we’re going to be here for 10 hrs., and we’d been doing this for 5, 10 years or so. Invariably they would get gassed in about 2 hours. The next 8 or 9 after that were just hell for them.
Lots and lots of those led me to that conclusion- high volume is just more than what ever you’re accustomed to.
I very much disagree with this sentiment.
And that most likely explains the feedback you’re receiving. The words you are using mean different things to the people that are hearing them.
You took amazing progress and a half-decent body as if they were describing the same thing when they are completely separate.
Are you saying amazing progress cannot result in a “half-decent body”? I’ve seen people start at 120lb and put on an obscene amount of muscle in just their first year due to steroids and no real plan. Progress a natural wouldn’t expect to get in a much, much longer time period. That is amazing progress, but it doesn’t mean they are Mr. Olympia or have anything of value to teach me, because the drugs got them there.
I know you admit to being a sophist, but I think you’re being a bit finicky here dude.
Yes: that is what I am saying. I would not consider a half-decent body to be amazing progress. Especially so in the context of “people I will listen to”, as I talked about someone that was big and strong and that was where we went from. I would not consider “half-decent” to be “big and strong”.
I feel you are being hyperbolic. We both have feelings about each other in that regard, but what I am wanting to establish is the core of the disagreement. We use the same words to mean different things, and so we were talking about different things while meaning the same.
We both said: “bike”. I thought motorcycle, you thought bicycle. Both work, but not at the same time.
It was my understanding that training releases cortisol. More training, more cortisol. All that is fine until the cortisol finds a binding site. AAS users have plenty of anabolics that compete with cortisol for those binding sites. The greater the anabolics, the lower likelyhood that cortisol will be able to find a binding site. They are all taken.
Do you accept that a bike and a motorcycle are both often most commonly recognisable as having two wheels, at least?
Honestly, I just think your measure of amazing progress is going to be way higher than the general publics because of the standard you’re at. Was just trying to conclude the discussion somehow. 
What is obscene?
An untrained individual weighing 120lbs can absolutely make a lot of progress in one year. The majority of gains will be made in the first year.
Obscene compared to a natural.
Not true.
I think you should stop using words like amazing and obscene with out any examples or proof.
The general public is fat and out of shape who cares what they think?
I like agreeing to disagree in those situations. It’s amicable. Nothing wrong with two people having different perspectives.
Yes. The majority of gains I made was the first year I cycled Dianabol.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
It really depends on who you’re around. Between 6th & 9th grade I went from 65lbs. to like 125-130. Natural. So literally doubled body weight.
There were also kids up in the higher weight classes, like 170-180 plus that were built like full grown men.
It really could be a matter of adding some good food and effort toward the goal.