This is really not even whether you have things such as minions or not. You could have them with bounded accuracy too, if you wanted. The point is about the uselessness of the rapidly escalating numbers in 4e. You don't actually use them! When they would matter, the enemy stats are changed so that they don't! That is just silly. If you don't want the impact of the escalation, just don't have it. Whether you have easily killable mook versions of the monsters on top of that is another matter entirely.
Yes, you do, if you follow the guidelines for how encounters are supposed to be built in 4e.
Here, let me get the quotes for you:
When you’re building an adventure, try to vary the encounters you include, including combat and non-combat challenges, easy and difficult encounters, a variety of settings and monsters, and situations that appeal to your players’ different personalities and motivations. This variation creates an exciting rhythm. Adventures that lack this sort of variety can become a tiresome grind.
(excised portion regarding encounter complexity, e.g. terrain, plot importance, conflicting interests, etc.)
If every encounter gives the players a perfectly balanced challenge, the game can get stale. Once in a while, characters need an encounter that doesn’t significantly tax their resources, or an encounter that makes them seriously scared for their characters’ survival—or even makes them flee.
The majority of the encounters in an adventure should be moderate difficulty—challenging but not overwhelming, falling right about the party’s level or one higher. Monsters in a standard encounter might range from three levels below the characters to about four levels above them. These encounters should make up the bulk of your adventure.
Easy encounters are two to three levels below the party, and might include monsters as many as four levels lower than the party. These encounters let the characters feel powerful. If you build an encounter using monsters that were a serious threat to the characters six or seven levels ago, you’ll remind them of how much they’ve grown in power and capabilities since the last time they fought those monsters. You might include an easy encounter about once per character level—don’t overdo it.
Hard encounters are two to three levels above the party, and can include monsters that are five to seven levels above the characters. These encounters really test the characters’ resources, and might force them to take an extended rest at the end. They also bring a greater feeling of accomplishment, though, so make sure to include about one such encounter per character level. However, be careful of using high-level soldiers and brutes in these encounters. Soldier monsters get really hard to hit when they’re five levels above the party, and brutes can do too much damage at that level.
Monsters that are more than eight levels higher than the characters can pretty easily kill a character, and in a group they have a chance of taking out the whole party. Use such overpowering encounters with great care. Players should enter the encounter with a clear sense of the danger they’re facing, and have at least one good option for escaping with their lives, whether that’s headlong flight or clever negotiation.
It explicitly says you should use
some encounters that are really easy, and some that are pretty hard; it even pointedly
does not say you shouldn't use very high-level monsters, only that doing so should be done with great care and, generally, preparation for giving the players some other kind of solution besides fight-to-the-death (such as fleeing or parley.)
They do, in fact, want the impact of the escalation. They want there to be SOME fights which really are a cakewalk. And some fights which are brutally hard. While also having actual, observable progression, where what you could barely fend off X levels ago is chump change to you now. That's even called out as a technique to use to give players context and meaning for their advancement over time, to genuinely use the exact same monster from "six levels ago"
Your thesis is simply
wrong. Not only does the text explicitly say you shouldn't have every fight be in lockstep with the PCs, it says that fights should vary a fair amount over time (even though the central tendency should still be somewhere in the "medium" to "hard" range). Further, it gives useful advice for how to do things well outside those ranges,
beyond simply saying that you should use minions or the like. Though it does also recommend their use (in a different section, not the one quoted here), alongside various other approaches and tools to help create more interesting, varied, memorable combats and challenges.
And this does, in fact, relate back to "bounded accuracy." Because a system designed the way 5e is struggles to do what I've just described. A CR 4 monster is something that should be a nasty threat for a group of level 2 characters (over the line for Deadly, though not at a hypothetical "Deadly+" difficulty). But a full
eighteen levels later, despite the rules
claiming that 10 CR 4 monsters would be an "easy" fight (a bit below Medium, actually), that fight would be way, way more deadly.
There just isn't enough
room in 5e to allow that real, obvious, unequivocal feeling of growth. 4e offers not one but (at least) two distinct ways to achieve that feeling: just straight-up using a monster 5-8 levels below the party, or turning it into a Minion. Both clearly demonstrate that the players have massively outclassed such monsters. There is no such thing as "massively outclassed such monsters" for anything past CR 2-3 in 5e. Only a
massive damage spell--e.g. dropping literally a 9th level spell like
meteor swarm--has such potential, and even then it isn't guaranteed because that's assuming every target fails its save, and at least a handful should pass.
