Sage advice for most folks, but I am quite often booking at 8pm the night I need to stay. At least 75% of my stays are booked booked day of. I generally agree that data > anecdote, but with hotel costs and utilization varying so much, it's difficult to apply data broadly.

Of my 240 hotel nights in 2022, the most expensive was $597 ( a HH property in BOS).

While hotels are more expensive and folks have shown they can find 1k/night rooms, they are not common enough for at least this biz traveler to seriously worry about and certainly not enough to consider them as defining an "era."
Obviously YMMV.