Baking soda costs $.80/lb. "Total Alkalinity Raiser" is between $3 and $5/lb Why do you think they want you to use that instead? (they are both sodium bicarbonate)
Washing soda costs $.80/lb. "pH Up!" and "Balance Pak 200" cost between $3 and $5/lb....and they are all Sodium Carbonate. Guess what they want you to buy?
Ultra Bleach and "Liquid Chlorine 6% are both Sodium hypochlorite solution. Yup. Same story.
Phosphate Removers, Algaecides, clarifiers, flocculants do little if anything (if you're lucky). Usually they cause more trouble.

The B-B-B method means you won't spend hundreds at the pool store. Naturally they want to prevent that.

Everything we know is wrong...yet time after time our methods works and predictably so. My wife says the only swimming pool she can go into and not get sick is ours. Of course, she would have equal confidence in the pools of any of our long-time followers of the B-B-B method.

Before I found PF over a decade ago, I bought the standard book: Taming the Pool Monster. It is, IMHO, pure junk. Industry nonsense.

Carl