The advice is correct but the reason is not. The Actions are not deprecated and will stay around for the long-term. At least I hope so because there are a couple of really good use cases for them. We do discourage their use when you have you know apriori what Item you have because of everything raised here.
But if you are using Design Pattern: Associated Items or some other approach where you are generating the name of an Item to send a command to based on some other criteria, the Actions are the best way to do it since they don’t require you to add the Items to a Group and use the findFirst trick to get a handle on them.
I really hope the Actions do not go away.