Sigh!
While I appreciate that people want checklists and easy to follow instructions and I’m sure that your checklist is as good as any other, checklist invariably mix obvious good things with suggestions of questionable merit. For example I never provide that 10% speedup estimate without context or the opportunity to ask for context, much like Justus’ advice on avoiding loops is quite right for a lot of cases, but it’s important to know when it’s not applicable. When you provide advice in a checklist form, all that context is lost. Here you took a bunch of bullet points and left out even the few qualifications I put in that overly condensed form of discussion.
And that’s the crux: Good style cannot be achieved by following checklists, much like you don’t gain much wit by buying a book of famous quotes. If there is a craft component to writing code, you need to learn - possibly by studying what people who would know - say like Soumith - wrote and trying to understand how it works and why it was written that way.
By following a checklist approach you get the code equivalent of how development processes look like when large companies decide to do “agile”, and implements it just by following an “agile checklist” someone gave them.
Best regards
Thomas