Eh, i have my reservations on that take.
On one hand, I can concede that having a "baseline" of randomly generated common items is... fine, even if maybe not ideal, as long as the genuinely unique items are limited to deliberate hand placement from a designer.
On the other hand I disagree with him that these common items should be necessarily better on average.
I think it's perfectly fine to have a somewhat randomized loot table (i.e. any character, enemy or container can eventually drop some stuff) precisely as long as their loot table is logically consistent sense (i.e. wolves shouldn't drop coins or weapons, poor farmers attacking you shouldn't drop jewelry, etc.) AND it's limited to trival/common items, ingredients, vendor trash.
And while I agree that shops shouldn't be the main source of rare items, I'm perfectly fine with every relevant vendor in the game having at least one or two interesting "Unique" for sale.
