The instructions that came with Record hand planes from essentially time immemorial until sold to Irwin (maybe they still do), specifically mentioned (at some length, not tangentially) moving the cap iron closer to the edge to mitigate tearout, as did every edition of Planecraft ever printed (something like nine or ten editions from the 1930s through 1980s). You will not find an edition of Planecraft that doesn't have the table that successively reduces the cap iron distance by half starting at a sixteenth down to a 64th, then "as close as you can get it". 16th, 32nd, 64th, 128th (implied.)
Other British sources published essentially the same guidelines, with math that got you down to around a distance of 1/128" - the imperial equivalent to the metric distance often recommended as a setting.
Anybody who could read had this information available to them from at least the 1930s onward. Nobody alive today "rediscovered" a bloody damned thing.
There was also a long thread on the Knots forum that easily predates the 2012 date often thrown around when the cap iron comes up for discussion in relationship to online woodworking forums - for those folks for whom internet history "matters" (hint: it doesn't).
All that said, working with an extremely close cap iron setting is still craftsman's choice. How you get to a finished surface is your business. And you'll have a hard time putting a No. 4 on certain curved surfaces so you'd better have a plan for them. You might wake up one morning sick of straight, flat, and grim rooms full of Shaker.