Yes! And the advice would be, like, "rethink your verb choices." OK, "The cat ate the salmon which I had taken out of the fridge." OK, there are no forms of 'to be' in that sentence, but it's not inherently superior to the original, and, depending on the context, the former may have been *better*! Because "was eating" and "ate" aren't the same tense, despite being both past tenses.

I should just link the English page when people are uninformed gits about grammar.