ok i am indoors for a heat wave break with my gatorade and my air conditioning the ACTUAL PROBLEM with "cut everything that doesn't move the plot forward" is that it was never meant to be the actual advice. the actual advice is that everything in the story should serve a purpose, and that is a distinction that i think a lot of modern editors, let alone members of the modern audience, fail to grasp.
this IS one of the craft discussions that got me yelled at on fandom twt because of the exact same misunderstanding. there are MANY ways for a scene to serve a story that have nothing to do with driving a plot, because plot itself is only one element of story. anyone who has not yet developed an understanding of story beyond "fictional events, described in order" might hear "everything in the story should serve a purpose" and parse it as "cut everything that doesn't move the plot forward" but, at the risk of being a pretentious bitch, that's never what the serious people were saying. in lrb example of far from the madding crowd four pages of a guy standing in a freezing sheep field at midnight watching the stars sticks with op because it serves the story without driving the plot. and a lot of those old books are classics that we still study to this day because (among other reasons) it is worth taking the time to sit with those scenes and ask ourselves what their purpose is, what they're doing there, how they work.
op is still thinking about gabriel oak in that field. why?
