What exactly do you “understand”? Do you knit? Do you do any sort of fiber art? Sometimes I think an aspect of this conversation is that people don’t understand or respect the complexity of fiber arts. Fast fashion has entirely distorted our understanding of how much complexity is involved in just producing the thread. Wool and flax have to be spun before you can knit or weave with them.

Needlebinding makes more sense in that premodern context where you don’t have modern sheep bred to have nice long staple length and the kind of spinning wheel to get consistent long threads. Needlebinding you usually work with short lengths, felted together.

It’s worked on/off the thumb with a single needle. Tying it to one of the dodecahedron pegs would be dumb.

For weaving, I guess you could use it as a really stupid pin loom.

Which yeah - I don’t think the Romans were stupid. Making a needlessly expensive metal object to do things extra inefficiently… why? The Romans had better ways to make textiles, which we actually have evidence of.

Arguments in history have to be more than “I saw a video of someone on YouTube doing someone cool, so that must be how the world works.”