Binoculars exist to provide magnification. That's it. Thats why they exist. Thats what they do. FOV is an attribute of a bino. One that differentiates one instrument from another, but it is not the reason the thing exists. FOV without magnification is not a thing. Can you imagine buying an FOV instrument? FOV of what?
That argument makes no sense.
Imagine the following statement:
"Cars exist to get you from A to B. That's it. That's why they exist. That's what they do. Horsepower is an attribute of a car. One that differentiates one car from another, but it is not the reason the thing exists. Horsepower without getting from A to B is not a thing. Can you imagine buying a HP car? HP of what?"
And yet people by cars with a lot of horsepower.
I get FOV may be why one buys one bino vs another. As well though, I see folly in some folks fixation on FOV as Ive written several times. Divide 1000 whatevers by 10 to get down to the birding relevant thing. Dont be fooled by marketing.
Who gets "fooled by marketing" when buying 7x35 binos from the 70's? They are not marketed and just a short while ago, a large FoV didn't seem to be much of a concern for the alpha makers.
So all things being equal, I'd always prefer a larger FoV. All things are not equal of course. To stay with my car analogy (us Germans love our cars) - do you want more hp or more trunk space?
I think it's not up for debate that there is a certain minimum of FoV to even be useful, and a certain FoV that might get too large and beginning to show too much abberations, distortions, whatever. I personally never came across a bino though where I said, "oh, now this is too much". And to claim magnification is the only important thing? It seems FoV has been very much a driving factor in bino development lately.
If all we care about is magnification, we might just as well still use Galilean binoculars with a tiny FoV.
To claim one cares not about FoV, only magnification should better read "I don't care about FoV past a certain point", let's say 60° AFoV.
Edit: just like with cars, one would maybe not buy one with 20 hp, while 60 might be fine and 500 too much for most uses.