The best way to get out of the friend zone is never to get into it in the first place and that was also true in 2004. I am not friends with any women who I find physically attractive. Staying out of the friend zone is one of the things I've done very well over time.
If a man happens to fall into the friend zone, he needs to tell the woman to kick rocks and move on.
OP was mostly correct back in 2004 and it holds up in 2024. There have been some lesser significant changes with this.
Millennial women (who were just starting to come into the market in 2004) have been worse at using IOIs than predecessor generations. I finished college/moved to a new city in 2005 and I moved to a new city in 2011. I noticed that in 2011, I was seeing far fewer IOIs in public than in 2005 in the exact same situation (new guy in a city looking for women). What changed between 2005 and 2011? Smartphones and social media. Millennials were going through this and this trend has persisted into Gen Z.
Roosh was saying that the neg was dead as far back as the early 2010s. Biatches had caught on to it.
In the 2020s, females might be more inclined to make things obvious or in-person approach the highest tier men. For a normie or upper level normie, that's not happening.
In the 2010s or 2020s, you're probably not going to be making a phone call to a new woman. I think it has become more important in recent years to arrange the date prior to collecting a phone number. If I were to get a woman's number on a Thursday from an in-person approach and set a date for the following Tuesday (5 days later), then collect her phone number, I wouldn't need to
text her until Monday and it would be primarily related to date logistics. I like the idea of not overtexting.
If a man for some reason doesn't set a concrete date when he gets her number, I do think waiting 2-4 days to text vs. texting same day or next day looks better. A guy is best served not putting himself in that position.
Agree that women have more options to choose from now than in 2004 when OP wrote what he wrote.
You have a valid point that women don't need to play hard to get in 2024. They have such abundance now that they don't need to pretend to be hard to get, many of them are actually hard to get because of how many prospects many women have lined up.
That said, OP's advice would still hold up today. It's always good to hold frame, lead the interaction, and push it forward.