Mostly it's word of mouth. People are extremely susceptible to confirmation bias, on average. Mix in a little ego, and they think anything they do 'definitely improved the results" despite a small sample size and never comparing it to a control group.
this is how we end up with myths like defoliation for the sake of defoliation, flushing at end of harvest and other bro-science concepts.
I've grown stuff caked in trichomes and stuff less densley populated with trichomes... it's genetics. simple as that. there is no magic bullet to polish a turd. Even if it does help, the effect is something tiny even if it is measurable.. e.g. CCT.. yes it does measurably impact resulting shape of plant in a statistically significant way (less or more bushy etc), but the effect is small. it is never, ever going to convert a short bushy plant into a lanky one or vice versa.
Most of the bro-science out there isn't even proven to be a small, statistically significant effect. it's just gossip and people too full of themselves to admit that the human senses and a sample size of a few plants with no control group is not going to result in a confident conclusion about anything.
Keep the plant healthy and happy and if it has the genes to do so, it'll be high quality. What we impact is a small portion of the total beyond that.
Try things one at a time with clones, if you want. take good notes. create a confident baseline expectation with them doing things in an orthodox way, first. This can be your control quasi-group. If you have seasons, that's going to throw a wrench into such plans as your enviornment chaning will fuck up what you see as far as comparing apples to apples.
In my experience, the gimmicks and over-sophisticaited stuff is not worth it.
the people saying things like "you have no idea what you are talking about" clearly have never learned about teh scientific method or taking any type of advanced science education.
in the one study mentioned, it doesn't really fully flesh it out. What is the cost of this stress? do you lose 10% of yield for a 1% increase in trichomes? it doesn't really prove anything specific. Also, 90% of intial studies are later proven false or not repeatable. so, you always need a preponderance of data to be confident about such things.
can stressing it create trichomes? maybe... but even if that is true there are other aspects to consider as to whether it is worth it.
As above, i simply say... Keep It Simple, Stupid... KISS Principle.