On Jan 5, 2023, in my very first telegram convo with fiatjaf, he said:
"I think clients must not talk to a bunch of relays as if they were all the same"
and then
"I think they must find and follow people in wherever relays they are"
to which I said
"This is a paradigm nobody seems to understand or talk about except you and I.  Lots of people are confused about how it could possibly work, and there is some massive event duplication going on in the background."
to which fiatjaf said
"I've been talking about that incessantly"

Based on that final statement, I'd say fiatjaf was saying this before the gossip client was doing it.  So with that I disclaim all responsibility, I didn't start this thing ;-)

There was no NIP saying this, and NIPs are all optional anyways.

This discussion has come up over and over and we have not settled on a direction, the community has instead split. I *hate* telling people what to do, I think people are free to copy notes and avoid connecting to strange relays and I *still* have mad respect for all the devs who do it that way.

I'm not sure it has to be one way or the other BUT I will stump for my way, and you have to live with the consequences of your way.  For example, not being able to see fiatjaf's quote posts, running massively overloaded relays, finding it easier to be banned from nostr than you thought, burning through network traffic between relays, realizing you have faux-privacy and you've actually just deceived your users by only patching the biggest privacy holes while leaving the little ones open, etc.

To me it is just decision -> consequence.  I don't care what other people choose to do, but I will try to predict the consequences.