DDD provides insights to understanding how a business works for people who are not domain experts themself, and are tasked to translate business requirements to code. This insight helps make appropriate decisions about those "most critical aspects of software development", nothing more, nothing less. Whether you use factories or not is a much lower-level technical decision far removed from the essence and rationale of 'doing DDD'.
That SO article if from '09 when 'big OOP' was all the hype. Hyping things to bigger proportions than they should be are a problem in IT. We just saw it for 'Microservices', for instance. These hypes serve to overpromise what you'll get, and sow confusion for years to come. In that regard I hope that DDD will not climb the hype cycle again, and we'll stay calm and just use what works.
I think most important to realize that DDD is just another tool in your toolbox, and can be used alongside all / most of the other tools you already use. Event storming can be a nice way to quickly kick off the elaboration process, should the method appeal to you.
