Why do you trust the descriptions of `ffmpeg -help`? What if some evil daemon [1] went into the binary and changed completely the behaviour of the flags? Do you read the source code and verify the checksums for every program you run? In the real world, good or bad, very few people care beyond a first level of trust: does it work for my current issue? great, no?, try something else.
Also, you disingenuously left out the parentheses from the quote: using a tool requires undertaking its downsides, if the downsides can be mitigated accordingly then the tool is useful. Millions of users put to good use imperfect tools daily.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
