Stop defacing quotes with brackets

In your second example, the quote is clear, verbatim as quotes are intended to be.

In the first example, what has been clear, precise syntax is not a matter of ambiguity.

In your example, it's somewhat clear, but inference is required to understand what was said.

The example given in the article actually does bring genuine ambiguity to what would otherwise be a precise, easily understood expression:

They may groan when Corky, denied the massive funding he’s asked for, tells the town council he’s going to “go home and bite [his] pillow,” the way I do now.

Did Corky say, "go home and bite pillow" broken English style?

Or, did Corky say something else?

Until this construct, we would know because "[his]" would be added into quote context. It would not be a modifier, essentially hiding or changing the quote.

Notably, what Corky did say isn't actually present in the expression, meaning we have to now trust the author interpreting things for us.

Breaking the line with how brackets are used is going to lead to significantly increased ambiguity, and that's going to happen because it will be employed to spin or otherwise manage far less trivial examples, and sorting it out will all take considerably more effort than it all would otherwise be, given brackets are never normally used to modify a quote itself.

And all for a bit of flow? I don't buy it. The whole affair diminishes how robust brackets are and introduced ambiguity into expression that does not add any real value.

If you never pulled out code into its own separate function just in order to name some lines of code, you should give it a try. You can avoid a lot of comments and/or confusion by just structuring your code in a way that allows you to name lines of code as concepts and abstractions. No need for it to happen more than once for you to do so.

I think back to the one period after sentence move we've seen play out for a while now.

When two spaces are used, end of sentence is a parsable thing, easily differentiated from other uses, such as abbreviations.

Without them, assistive technology gets capitalization wrong all the time.

This kind of thing makes problem spaces way larger and more complicated than they need to be.

If $Author writes: "The foundations of the notion of fluid modernity (as outlined in the previous chapters) is fundamentally the simultaneity of dichotomies".

And I quote them as: "The foundations of the notion of fluid modernity [...] is fundamentally the simultaneity of dichotomies". I am not in any way changing their intended message. The author in that case reminded their reader about something they read in the previous chapter, something my readers cannot be reminded of, unless they also read the book recently. Therefore skipping that part with an ellipsis arguably would even be in the interest of $Author, because it isn't their quote that throws my readers off without $Author's fault.

This is just one example. Another very typical case would be if I'd write about $Person and quote someone who wrote "Jules Favre traveled to Königsberg in 1871 to negotiate peace with the Prussians, where he was met with ..."

Then if I'd write in the context of my text: "[He] traveled to Königsberg in 1871 to negotiate peace with the Prussians, where he was met with ..." wouldn't this again be totally okay if it improves readability in the context of my text?

The stuff I outline here is extremely common in theoretical, philosophical or historical texts. The existence of abusive misquoting doesn't mean one cannot use brackets in a responsible and good way (and you can also misquote without brackets).