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I gave this one a read earlier today, and I thought it had a lot of parallels with your argument against adding levels to Cairn. I think leveling would definitely qualify as a “Dominant Mechanic.”
The mental models article at the end of this was really interesting if folks haven’t read that.
Clayton, of course, says a bunch of smart things again. I had a similar experience of Dominant Mechanics being a bad thing when I introduced friends to Dungeon World back in the day. They had only ever played D&D, so when we got to combat they ended asking me to include initiative (or when they ran, they used initiative, which I did not like).