Yeah, I don't really understand why many (?) people here are going for those 26 mm inner width rims for road use with narrow tires. ETRTO recommendations don't exist for nothing. You can usually go a bit further than recommended, but it's a bit of a gamble.
Unless you want to to exclusively run 32+ mm tires, don't get those rims!
That said, it would be great to see something between 21 mm and 26 mm rim width. Something like 23 or 24 mm would be pretty versatile.
Well, it's hard not to see the direction of the industry. With Enve ses line, their 25/33 width, they recommend 27c as a minimum and they literally state "aero optimized tr tyre size". With the trend towards wider tyres, and having 105% aero "rule" (and it really does mean something), it's really hard to ignore that.
Kudos to Serge_K for introducing me this trend, and recommending to go wider. I went initially with 28 ow, but told Peter if it's ok to change to wider option, and thankfully he approved. Cost difference is about 20$ per rim, even less.
On the same tangent, but a bit different topic. Chinese industry follows the trend. After all, all major brands ship their blueprints long before the product arrives to market. And they ship them blueprints to manufacturing plants, guess where? Well, China
...And don't you think that once they have their eyes on those blueprints, they won't use the opportunity to jump ahead of the rest? Meaning they'll have the similar product ready to be manufactured as soon it gets the hype from that major brand?
I bought my carbonda fm936 xc full-sus 2y ago. The frame was from 2019. And the geometry is still SPOT ON with the trend. If you go to 2019. and see the geo numbers on all xc bikes, you see huge difference with some noname chinese oem's that somehow made so progressive frame years before it was the "thing".
They follow the trends, and use simple logic to get advantage every way they can. It may be not so moral from some perspective, but damn, we can get up-to-date products with decent enough quality for a really good bargain. Take my money.