Exposure calculations would be so much easier if lens rings
and shutter buttons were labelled with APEX values (all logs)
instead of the bizarre system we inherited from the early days
of photography. Then:

EV = Aperture + Time = Luminance + ISO

instead of

square(Aperture) /Time = Luminance * ISO) / K

where K is the meter calibration constant.

Self-inflicted complexity is bad.

We could also stop pretending that 8 * 2 = 15 and 60 * 2 = 125,

There is a current discussion regarding ETTR/EBTR (Expose To The Right/Expose Beyond The Right). By now the discussion is up to 5 pages with a lot of theoretical posts clouding the issue. In the words of Robert Mapplethorp, "Look at the pictures". Here's several of two subjects, one taken about 2 years ago and one taken this morning. Note the ETTR technique was used in each of these. The restaurant photograph was taken with a relatively new camera, for me. It's one of the first "field test" photos putting the test results settings, determined a week ago, to a field test. Up until now a Macbeth color chart was all that camera has seen.

There's a lot of hesitation on some people's parts regarding blowing highlights. If one tests their equipment this becomes a moot point. All of these were done in manual mode, spot metering on the brightest part of the scene, then exposure added to place that part in the appropriate Zone. In digital imaging, The Zone System is somewhat 180 degrees different than the film Zone System. Digital requires the whites to be placed and the blacks to be handled in processing. Black and white film requires the blacks to be placed and the processing is adjusted depending on where the highlight values fall.

Knowing your equipment through planned and controlled testing will remove the fear of blowing highlights.

Each has the ACR screenshot showing the "overexposed" areas, as considered by Adobe. Then, an SOOC version of the image, followed by the processed photograph. In the case of the bird, I included an intermediate step because I did lot of burning to darken the surrounding area and didn't want that clouding the discussion.
--Bob

Different scenes present different exposure challenges.
Different photographers will prefer different solutions and make differnt choices.
No rule-of-thumb can replace knowledge and good taste.

"Expose for shadows and develop for highlights" was a popular rule for B&W negative film.
The equivalent rule for digital would be "Expose for highlights and process for shadows."
(ETTR is a clumsy expression which mixes in histograms.)

But Zone Photographers -- while acknowleging that was much better than nothing--did not
follow that film rule. Instead, they chose the exposure which enabled them to make a print
that matched their visualization of the subject. Often that meant some inky shadows, or
some blown highlights, or both.

Never ask your camera "does this image look good?" It doesn't know: it's just a machine.

That proves absolutely nothing!

You can take an image that includes highlights that are totally blown in the raw file and still reduce it below values of 255 in the JPEG.

Here is an image with deliberately blown out highlights. I reduced the exposure one stop and applied 100 units of highlight reduction in Capture One Pro. The highlights still look blown out even though the JPEG values don't go over 238,238,238.

You need to view the raw file in RawDigger, not the edited JPEG, to see whether the highlights are actually blown.

Different scenes present different exposure challenges.
Different photographers will prefer different solutions and make differnt choices.
No rule-of-thumb can replace knowledge and good taste.

"Expose for shadows and develop for highlights" was a popular rule for B&W negative film.
The equivalent rule for digital would be "Expose for highlights and process for shadows."
(ETTR is a clumsy expression which mixes in histograms.)

But Zone Photographers -- while acknowleging that was much better than nothing--did not
follow that film rule. Instead, they chose the exposure which enabled them to make a print
that matched their visualization of the subject. Often that meant some inky shadows, or
some blown highlights, or both.

Never ask your camera "does this image look good?" It doesn't know: it's just a machine.