A statement this emphatic and absolute can't possibly be true.

Here's a concrete complaint that I have with CAM16: the unique hues and hue spacing it defines for its concept of hue quadrature and hue composition are nontrivially different than the ones in CIECAM02 or CIECAM97s, but those changes are not justified or explained anywhere, because the change was just an accidental oversight. (The previous models' unique hues were chosen carefully based on psychometric data.)

> because it's 400 lines of code, we are robbed

It's not really surprising that people reach for math which is computationally cheap when they need to do something to every pixel which appears in a large video file or is sent to a computer's display.