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This is a popular myth pushed by Health At Every Size advocates (who are mostly morbidly obese women). Starvation mode does not exist unless you are actually starving. Plateaus happen when your deficit becomes maintenence because you dropped weight, you need start eating even less to continue losing weight.
When losing weight, you need to make it a lifestyle change and not a diet, otherwise you will gain it back.
Can't tell if you're agreeing with me or shitting on me. "Starvation mode", where you magically start to defy the laws of thermodynamics isn't a thing. Subconscious reduction in NEAT (non exercise associated thermogenesis) in prolonged caloric deficit is a very real phenomena. You walk less, you stop tapping your foot along to music, you stand still, when you'd otherwise burn a few calories shifting your weight from foot to foot, rather than scanning the horizon, and swinging your head back and forth, you just stare off into the distance.
As you continue to hold caloric deficit for longer periods of time, the degree of psychological stress required to maintain the same deficit slowly increases. Cortisol levels creep up. Sleep quality starts to degrade. It begins to get more difficult to maintain muscle mass. And yes, as your weight decreases, so too do your maintenance calories. And the longer you're under this stress, the more likely it is that once your diet is over, you'll been binge eat, and undo a bunch of hard work. Especially if you're someone who already struggles with weight and controlling their diet.
Again, the laws of thermodynamics still apply. If you maintain the same deficit, you will lose weight at the same rate. Its just that really extended diets make it way more difficult than necessary. To use a metaphor, if you have an exam, yeah, I guess technically you could pull 4 all nighters in a row, and study for 80 hours straight... That doesn't mean its a good idea, especially if you already find the subject matter really complex, and difficult to understand.
Also, a fat loss diet is by definition unsustainable. If you can sustain the same deficit forever, guess what? Its maintenance, not a deficit. You should be able to sustain it without a huge amount of stress for around 8-12 weeks. The last 2-3 weeks might start getting difficult, but before that, it should generally feel pretty doable, assuming that you're generally focusing on satiating foods, aren't dropping fats way too low, and don't have your carbs in the weird middle ground, where you don't have enough to function, but have too many to be in ketosis.
Once your fat loss diet is up, bring your calories back up to maintenance. Some people find that if they slowly go up to maintenance, over a few weeks, then its easier to stick to maintenance, rather than binging. Keep in mind, even if you're at true maintenance, down to calorie, you'll still probably regain a little bit of weight, because you have more food/poop in your stomach, and more glycogen/water retention from bringing carbs back up. That doesn't necessarily mean you're getting fat. Even if you do regain some fat, let's say you diet for 12 weeks, lose 13℅ of your body mass, regain 1.5℅, then diet again, and lose another 8℅, on net, that's phenomenal progress.
After a month or two at maintenance, you'll have way lower stress, you'll be sleeping great, have tons of energy, be moving way more, and you'll be ready to go back on fat loss diet, and fucking kill it.
Periodization works. Regardless of what specific changes you're trying to make to your body (fat lose, muscle gain, strength gain, endurance, etc...) Following some kind of periodized approach is going to get you the most bang for your buck, the best results, with the least effort. You do something that is slightly more difficult than you can sustain (caloric deficit, weight training, interval training, etc...) for a roughly defined block of time, and make progress while accruing stress. Then, once that stress starts to make it more difficult to continue progressing, you back off, and let that fatigue and stress melt away, before stepping on the gas again, feeling refreshed an reinvigorated.
Maybe fatigue and stress build up faster than you think, maybe you were planning for 12 weeks, but at week 9, you'd be willing to blow your brains out, as long as you got to eat a cheeseburger first. That's fine, cut the diet early, focus on sticking to maintenance, and keeping that progress you made, rather than pushing too hard, and undoing your whole diet a month later.
All that said, if you had, like 1 day that you wanted to be as slim as possible for, and literally did not care whatsoever if you regained 30 lbs the very next day, yeah sure, you can go way harder, diet way longer, grit your teeth and just white knuckle it. But as long as your after long term changes in body composition and weight, then slightly unsustainable blocks of caloric deficit, punctuated by shorter blocks at maintenance is the best approach.
High protein is good because it helps maintain muscle, and burns a small amount of calories to digest. Don't bring fat super low, or most people will seriously fuck up their mood. Aside from that, all other diet methodologies (time restricted eating, food selection, etc...) Basically just boil down to whatever makes it easiest for you, personally to maintain that deficit. For some people, it might be small meals every 2-3 hours, others it might be one meal a day. Some people might do really well on a keto diet, others might find compliance much easier if they maintain moderate carbs. These choices might have impacts on specific aspects of health, but at least from a fat loss perspective, they're all basically the same, and any minor benefits one might have are small enough to be outweighed by the benefit of actually being able to comply with a deficit as well as possible, with the lowest possible amount of effort.
If I misunderstood, and you were agreeing with me, uhh, sorry dood, I'm autistic
