Wikipedia:Tfm template considered harmful

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This page in a nutshell: The {{subst:tfm}} template should be noincluded when used, especially with infoboxes.

In late 2018, there was a major surge in merger nominations of infoboxes. This caused the TFM template to appear on more than 60 thousand articles. Unlike deletion, merger nominations are considered unimportant. It may have seemed like a good idea to just copy the TFM template from the TFD template in 2006, but in hindsight, it seems ridiculous.

So what's the solution?

Instead of doing this:

{{subst:tfm}}

do this:

<noinclude>{{subst:tfm}}</noinclude>

If Twinkle was changed to always noinclude TFM templates when making a template merger nomination, and a bot with template-editor permissions was used to automatically noinclude non-noincluded TFM templates, the clutter on main-namespace articles would be reduced exponentially.