Thanks for the thorough response. I agree that the CSS Grid philosophy is to give you the tools to create exactly the amount of columns/rows you need for your example, and not being constrained to any pre-defined amount.

However, the point of this article was to show how to use CSS Grid to quickly experiment with layouts. And in that case, it makes sense to have a lot of columns to choose from, as more columns give you more room for experimentations.

I probably should have illustrated how to take advantage of all the columns in a better way, e.g. something like this.