Is there such a thing as good taste?

Consider an American food analogue. Do I distinguish good and bad grilled cheese? How can I when its identity is that of a basic, unhealthy, cheap, low-class food? If you add more exotic ingredients, it becomes distant from its quintessential identity, so it becomes "good" grilled cheese in inverse proportion to it being, actually, grilled cheese. Contrariwise, if you enhance it by further indulging in the fats, oils, salts, etc., can we say this is "better" when it has also become even more base, even more low class? It becomes better as it becomes worse.

I find myself wanting to say something similar to your friend. All the grilled cheese are the same to me. I can plainly see one is different than another, but they are all objects of derision, and they only rise above that derision insofar as they stop being grilled cheese.

The presented "proof" doesn't go any further than that, though. It mentions that it changes a lot over time, but instead of engaging with that as an indicator that taste is always a moment-by-moment subjective thing, then IMO goes off the rails a bit with weird analogies. It ends up circular. Good art is that which causes the desired reaction in those with good taste?

The best counter-argument to this skill/practice-based argument is that you can put a lot of skill and practice into something that people end up rejecting. Literature, film, and music shows plenty of examples of this. Even software shows this - you can spend a lot of effort to make a very intricate piece of software, that someone with "taste" may sneer at because of how fragile it is, even if they couldn't create it themselves. And then you are left just with that circular "your effort and practice and skill doesn't matter if it doesn't focus on the right things that hit your audience the right way, so the important skill is that of hitting your audience the right way, so a lot of it is up to the audience, so good taste is defined by ... itself and its audience"?

In order for this to be a valid take, it requires that we have some way to measure goodness. Else how can we determine what is good and what is not, and then judge peoples' taste? But I don't think anyone's yet proven any such measure to exist. Certainly many people have offered their personal viewpoint, but how do we know which one has the best taste? We're in a bit of a deadlock - we need to be able to measure goodness to say who has good taste, but we need to know who has good taste so we can know how to measure goodness.

With that said, Paul Graham ultimately ends by saying that "There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them, but there is equally definitely a partial order of both." Which is not particularly insightful, in my opinion. It's quite easy to see that a flawed attempt to replicate another's work is worse than the unflawed original. But no one really cares about such things, and no one is surprised by this revelation. All in all, the essay takes a long meandering road to make it sound like there is such a thing as good taste, then at the last moment redefines it to something different and uninspired, hoping that the reader is too invested at that point to care. Frankly, it felt disrespectful to the reader, a deceitful waste of time.

This kind of assumes that all good artists have good taste. Some artists may have good taste, but may not be great artists themselves. Others may create great art, sometimes by chance, and understand its relevance post-facto (maybe as it becomes more contextually relevant?).

In my experience (some engineering, mostly product mgmt), taste is an emergent property. As some others have alluded, good taste can emerge from both intuition and thought/reflection. The hard part is articulating what makes one piece of art better than others. Most people can recognize the gap between paintings of an 8 yr old's painting vs. Bellini, but does that mean they have good taste? Many of us have some built-in, intuitive sense of taste. But to apply/execute on it, we need to be able to articulate it.