I've never suggested to anyone that I knew that they had to get rid of all their belongings to get better, and I can't recall hearing any other experienced mold avoiders say that either.
Some mold toxins are MUCH worse than others. Some people are much more reactive than others. If you work hard enough at it, your reactivity may go down over time, and you may be able to tolerate all kinds of toxins much more than in the past. So what people need to do to get clear depends on the circumstances.
What Erik has always said, and I have always echoed, is that if people are very sick in a problematic place, it is hard for them to know whether their possessions are a problem or not. If they can get entirely away from their possessions for a while (e.g. the stereotypical two-week vacation in Death Valley), then they can figure out when they return whether their environment -- including their stuff -- is a problem.
Maybe things will be perfectly fine after a wash. I've known a number of people who had that experience. I've known other people who have found that washing their possessions was not helpful at all and that starting entirely over (including with new cars) was totally essential.
In some cases, for some people and with some toxins, one contaminated object can be enough to keep the person totally sick, all by itself. In other cases, people may be able to tolerate a whole houseful of furniture from a bad place, with no washing at all. It just depends on factors that even experienced people -- much less newbies -- are not going to be able to predict.
So there's no way to say for sure that what somebody else is doing is not extreme enough or is too extreme. It all depends on the specific circumstance.
I also think it's a mistake for people to think that just because they get rid of the possessions from their problematic house, they will need to be running from every little bit of mold for the rest of their lives. People with ME/CFS very often are living in particularly problematic places or with particularly problematic contaminated belongings (it is my suspicion that this is why they are so sick). And so very often, if people can get rid of those particularly problematic items, other exposures are much easier to deal with.
After I started avoidance afresh, there were a few occasions when I encountered items that were so badly contaminated that I had to send them back to the store, or when I cross-contaminated things that I already owned badly enough that I had to give them away. But that was quite rare, fortunately.
Barring that, awareness and reasonable compromise is what we got...
