5 Reasons to Use Inline Variables in Delphi
https://landgraf.dev/en/5-reasons-to-use-inline-variables-in-delphi/
1. opinion, not fact. Clear weasel clause "for many people" to make opinion seem fact. Worse, it seems to be deliberately one-sided, not mentioning the contra argument that in complex code the downside is having to search the definition inside many code lines instead of a clear position (the VAR block). Though at least that can be mitigated with an IDE (jump to declaration) like functionality. But that goes for both cases.
2. opinion, not fact. and again the weasel words "many people". FPC can turn warnings into errors.
3. Not always less typing. E.g. a few loop vars will have multiple extra VAR's, while in the var block the "VAR" is shared. But this is still mostly stands.
4. Funny, back then they had exactly the opposite reasoning (mass initializing/finalizing at the start/end is cheaper than multiple times one, options to zero multiple local variables with one rep stosb etc). Also, in cases where the compiler can determine if a block is taken or not it can chose the most optimal way, so even if it was a netto plus (which I doubt), this only goes for the most a naive implementation.
5. This is the only one that rings somewhat true from my own experience.
(6, not in article) playing into familiarity feelings from other languages in a "100000 lemmings can't be wrong" sentiment.
So 1 and 4 are simply extreme one sided spotlight on this feature just to make a seem worthy. The option 2 is extreme corner case and mixes in an opinion about warnings and weaselling "many people" again. All three seem to be carefully crafted to not try to find the other side of the story.
5 is true, and not purely hypothetical. Of course a simple IDE macro would solve it (even easier in lazarus that only has tp append {%H-} or {%w-}.
The true reason to add it is probably language-feature-by-mob-rule fuelled by perceived benefits (3 and 6). But not with language design as the article seem to imply.