Respectfully, I totally disagree with this statement. If you have an element that is repeated on multiple, sometimes dozens of pages, creating reusable elements speeds up your workflow in an order of magnitude.

If you’re spending a lot of time making the symbol hyper extensible and customizable, maybe, but in progress designs benefit from being able to make few changes to see lots of impact rather than bunch of repeated actions.

Although, I do think that Sketch handles symbols incorrectly, which is why I switched from it to Figma.