Vague tempo markings are unhelpful. So are the opposite.
I’ve written before about vague tempo markings. And certainly I would be happy to never see “Moderately” over bar 1 of a score again.
But in the most recent crop of piano-vocal scores, I’ve also seen several that skew too far in the opposite direction. Things like a marking of quarter=90 and then eight bars later, “Driving, quarter=91.” This level of specificity might work in the recording studio, but for the people using the scores in real-world situations, it’s far too specific. Very few will check the metronome in this sort of situation, and even if they did in practice, the live performance situation would tend to vary a lot more than this granular sort of marking would allow.
I’m trying not to be too critical of both sides of the coin – but there is a wide middle ground in which specific tempos are defined whenever there is a truly new tempo, and then modifying words can help guide the interpretation.