I've noticed that a lot of engineering books cover concepts which are useful in the hands of senior developers but are harmful in the hands of junior developers because they misunderstand the nuance due to lack of experience.
It reminds me of the phrase "If all you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.." But in the case of a thick design patterns book, it amounts to giving the junior dev a whole toolbox... The junior dev tends to assume that every problem they'll ever face requires them to use one of the tools from that toolbox... But reality isn't so neat; you rarely use a specific tool in its native form as it's described. They are conceptual tools which need to be adapted to various situations and they are only really useful in highly complex scenarios which can often be avoided entirely.
The one piece of advice which is closest to 'universal' which I can give about software development is this:
"You should be able to walk through and describe any feature provided by your code using plain English, in such a way that a non-technical listener would gain a complete understanding of what the code is doing but without having to dive into functions whose implementation details would exceed the listener's mental capabilities."
When someone talks me through some feature they developed and they start jumping around 10 different files 80% of which have technical names which they invented and they keep having to define new concepts just to explain what the code is doing at a high level; this is a red flag. It shows that their code is over-engineered and that they haven't fully made sense of what they're doing in their own mind.
My philosophy is basically a variant of "Rubber duck debugging" as proposed in the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas... But you imagine the duck to have the intellect and knowledge of a non-technical middle-manager, and you use the approach during design and development; not just debugging.