You can blot out the sun with a speedlight. It is just a matter distance to the subject and control of the ambient light.

There are multiple cameras on the market that can sync at 1/250 without switching to HSS.

No, it’s not reasonable and you need to reread the post. They aren’t talking about controlling the images he is paid for. They are talking about controlling how he presents his personal work created on his own time.

For photography to be real anymore it would have needed to be real at some point in the past. It wasn’t. It has at most been a reasonable approximation of reality, but sometimes pretty far. How is B&W photography real? The world is in color. Using color filters when shooting B&W would alter relative tonal relationships at the time of exposure. There’s your in camera image manipulation long before digital cameras were invented.

OK, B&W isn’t real, but color is. Nope. Every color stock reproduced the color world differently depending on the sensibilities of the chemists who developed the emulsion. If they were all different, which one of those realities was really real?

Film is tangible and electronic impulses are not. That’s the only difference.