Yes, that - plastic pots beat fabric ones - in certain conditions.
I went from air pots and a lot of fabric pots back to simple plastic pots. I grow in small spaces, and my experience has been that plastic pots are simply lower maintenance in those, and with healthy plants I've found the root pruning to not make such a big difference in relation to that.
So, for nursery & veg as well as for flower in phenotype hunts at least, I'm back to plastic all the way from starter cup through 0.75L to 2L. Although I still use a big fabric pot in my main stash grow (a single one as large as I can fit in the tent, which is 10gal) where I skip the 2L stage.
Also, I realise LEDs pretty much completely dominate the space nowadays, but personally I went from LED (AC Infinity S22) back to CMH (Sun System LEC) for my main stash grow. Pulled the big old thing out of storage after 5 years.
Grow runs slightly warmer by a couple of degrees than with the LED for what I guess are not that many more photons, but the spectrum seems nicer somehow, can't quite quantify it (so it might be purely in my head but then again so is the high etc.pp.). I also have this weird belief my cultivars taste ... more somehow ... when CHM grown than if LED grown. Again, I can't quite quantify it, but it seems there is just more expression of things going on. This is purely subjective and not scientific at all other than I'm growing a clone of the same cut I've grown for years through different methods. The difference is likely very small but enough for me to spend the extra few watts.
The tent for phenotype hunting still uses LED but I've added UVA to them to lean more closely towards the CMH's spectrum.
