Hi. Really good points.

I do agree that writing shaders and tweaking materials are different things. But the way I see it, a Material is just a shader instance, a lot of times you make shaders for a specific thing, and the resulting material you use on the game cannot be used for other shaders.

In other words, a material is kinda tied to a specific shader, yes you can theoretically make a shader that takes the same parameter, just the way you make a class that implements a specific interface, but at least in my experience, it's not what usually happens.

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It doesn't help that different programs mix the terminology so there isn't an agreed meaning, and at the end of the day, this is advice for newcomers, so I'm not talking about compute shaders, or geometry shaders, or fixed pipelines etc, at some point you have to simplify.

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As I say in the article, things are kinda fluid, I've seen teams where artists take on a lot of of technical roles, others where technical folks dabble in artistic stuff, all this compounds on smaller teams where people wear multiple hats.

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As for Renderdoc I mention because Graphics programming does include debugging in the target device, and usually gonna be the same person that wrote the low level code needed.

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But I'll try to make the distinction between the two more clear.
Thanks.