Awesome read!
My takeaway is that perhaps I've been overrating neural work for myself (3 rep work) and underrating higher rep work for mass (8+) and VOLUME
However, I got to this part:
Keep volume for your main lifts low to moderate, and stay at least 1-2 reps shy of failure at all times (avoiding technical failure). You don’t need a ton of high quality, heavy work to maintain and improve neural factors, but getting the bulk of your training volume from your main lifts will generally beat you up a bit more, and limit how much total training volume you can handle per session and per week.
This goes against what I remember learning in a verkoshansky book, i believe it was. Basically you dont stimulate all of your muscles until you are basically just about at failure. I remember after learning this, i saw some pretty quick strength gains when i put an end to stopping 2-3 reps short. These days, I stop when I think my next rep will be a fail.
Also:
I recommend accessory lifts over lighter sets of squat, bench, and deadlift to cut down on risk of overuse injuries, and to keep training specificity high for the main lifts (since lifting heavy stuff for low reps and lighter stuff for higher reps are different skills, you don’t want to “water down” the motor learning you’re doing your main lifts, unless you’re splitting your training into more distinct phases, as we’ll discuss later).
I've always been a fan of "just squat more if I want to get better at my squat." But I never thought of 1) avoiding injuries by mixing it up, and 2) this would lower training specificity by watering down my big lifts with fatigued sets of higher reps