Seems recently there are more advocate on using live rock, just like it was several years ago on dry rock. It now went full cycle. I have no problem with people wanting to go back to live rock for various reason, but it feels weird that it so often framed as "dry rock sucks". The most I saw in my feed are ReefBum's. In every single live stream he's trying to validate his argument of "live rock > dry rock". It gets old pretty fast. You don't have to proof the other option bad to legitimatize your choice.
In my experience, both live rocks and dry rocks have its own challenge, and solutions. So it's not like one is necessarily better than the other. It's just choose which battle you want to fight.
On dry rock, the problem is clear, and often cited as the reason it "sucks", that's it prompt to dino outbreak. In my experience, it's because of the lack of competitors in a deserted new tank. So the easy solution is slow cycle with lights off. Run the tank for 3+ months with low or no light, to let the non-photosynthetic bacteria and micro organism establish and take over living space before the light loving one. It may also help to seed the tank with some non-photosynthetic lives, like some sun coral, NPS gorgonia, feather duster, christmas worm, etc. Plugs and rubbles come with them will bring in more diversity of bacteria, coraline, sponge, etc. The problems people usually get is when they light the tank right after nitrogen cycle is complete, or even before that. When it's a totally empty battle field, light love organism like diatom/dino seem to have the advantage to take over.
On live rock, it has its same problem of unexpected pest. Years ago when most people use live rock, that's what people were talking about all the time. Unknown crab, worms, mantis shrimp, majano, are not strangers to our tanks. Also seeded with macro algae making algae boom that much more common. Same as dino with dry rock, these are all solvable problems. Careful dips and cleaning, "curing", etc. can minimize unwanted pest going in. Also most of those "pest" are not that detrimental, probably except mantis shrimp and bobbit woarm. Most are mild annoyance. With live rock, the tank will be able to mature and stable than with dry rock. That's probably the reason why dino was not such a common problem back then. But then, people are usually spend months to cure live rocks, so is live rock actually mature faster? or is just dry rock give people for false sense to go too fast?
So both options have its pros and cons. Higher likelihood of dino vs higher likelihood of unwanted pest/algae/critters. That's before taking account into cost and availability. For me, the factor mostly goes down to cost, since both work just fine, it's nature to go with the cheaper option, and save the grand on live rock towards corals instead.
