These days if your not going to failure or beyond with 5 plates a side on this and that your seen as a sissy trainer but I can do brutal workouts without touching failure let alone assisted reps. And I see great gains from it. Especially if your an influencer who makes workout videos its all about appearing impressive, hence why I dont bother much with that bullshit. Training is for me.
Lately nothing has worked for me. So I've tried to push it more, like on smith squats with bands to a very low box to stadardise rep range, about 8 reps to true fail and then 2 negatives (need a strong spotter lol, someone who can pull about 100kg easy). Have been getting sore, which has barely happened past few years, perhaps Basile is right and there is some faint connection between soreness and growth

I do think spending time in that close to fail range is important.
I have heard that, but that would mean you could train much faster with heavy singles/doubles + a failure rep and be done very quickly.
I think volume has to come into play in some context.
Yes they have a stipulation that you need about 5 or 8 reps or whatever, to get in the "hypertrophy rep range" but might as well do 30 reps to failure
They used to talk about "metabolic training" also being anabolic through metabolite accumulation in the muscle, which more volume would do, but now they say this was completely hypothetical.