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I've noticed people argue for #NoEstimates in a bunch of different ways. Here are some:
Size everything about the same and count them, it'll give you just as good results as estimating.
Split stories as small as you can and then count them, it'll give you just as good results as estimating.
It's useful to estimate whole projects so you can decide whether to fund them, but don't waste time estimating day-to-day activities
Estimate day-to-day activites because they are simple enough to understand, but don't try to estimate whole projects which are full of unknowables
Estimates are unreliable, so we shouldn't use them to make decisions
Estimate value, not cost. Value varies by orders of magnitude. High-value work will exceed the cost by so much that cost won't matter.
The parts of our work that can be estimated aren't the parts that matter: if you understand work well enough to estimate it reliably, then it's in the Complicated or Obvious domains and you should automate it.
We could estimate reliably, but there are other approachaes that produce better outcomes. Using estimtes takes your attention away from those other approaches.
When there's a lot of technical debt, you can't estimate reliably because you never know when you'll hit a quagmire. Accidental complexity greatly exceeds essential complexity, but inconsistently. See "7 minutes 26 seconds".
When the team owns its business outcomes, it doesn't need estimates. See "AFM Optimizing".
