90% of the time I’d agree and I shoot for the highlights, however I’ve never really had results that made me happy out of the expose for the highlights method when it comes to back lighting. Despite better denoising in darktable and RawTherepee in later releases the pushed shadows always almost look awful compared to exposing for them in camera and just saying to heck with hightlights. Even the proprietary software packages don’t do a great job with it, or at least they didn’t 5-6 years ago when I last ran them. Indeed, sometimes it doesn’t work out and I’d say for the vast majority of photos you want to watch the right side of the histrogram. Examples of what I’m talking about from my own work.
Granted most of the time I’m using strobe to get the foreground a couple of stops up from the ambient exposure so there’s not as huge of a difference between the highlights and the subject. I’m sure the more technical photographers among you can probably tell me the 500 different ways those photos are bad, should be junked and I should donate my camera to someone who can put it to better use but I think they “look good” for a lack of a better term. Sorry I am my own harshest critic!
It was a different story when I did astronomy professionally, overexposure was a big no-no for data gathering.
But my image is being used in this thread as “look what this dumb !@#$$# did” bad example here so maybe don’t listen to me. 
Just felt the need to defend us no good, dumb, dirty, stinky backlighters here!