I agree 100%. Just opening a wine to let it breathe (i.e.the Audouze method) does nothing, IMO.
In my tasting group (serious collectors, exclusively old world, predominately Burgundy), every wine is opened AND DECANTED around 4PM to be poured between 5-6 PM for whites and 6-7 PM for reds. It is extremely rare for a wine to show poorly after several hours of decanting.
The answer varies hugely depending on the type of wine and the age.
I think this Chambers Street Wines’ guide to decanting is pretty sensible:
https://chambersstwines.com/Articles/1889/decanting-wine
I perhaps missed it but didn’t see anyone mention glasses. It is also one of the parameters that also can have a significant impact on how the wine is perceived.
I feel like sometimes I have had older wines that die in the decanter. First glass great - last glass dead (after a few hours).
Well thought response! The other thing I notice ( and maybe it is more me) is that the first whiff can sometimes be the best - as you decant the bottle with a really good wine sometimes the whole room smells of it in a good way - and then it as you drink it that first smell is never quite the same.
Of course it may just be that COVID killed my ability to smell as well!
Some wines improve a lot after the half full bottle has been in the fridge for 48 hours +
Other should be pop n pour and followed in the glass
Such a hard topic to answer. Depends so much on the wine and its age.
What I normally do if I have time is to follow the wine(s) carefully.
Open it early in the day. Get a sense of it. Recork it firmly if its open and put it in the fridge. If not then there are an array of possibilities for how to go about it. Requires a bit of knowledge and experience to get it right with different wines.
Some wines are just not ready when opened in an awkward spot… not much to do about it.
That typically meant the wine was already past its prime or provenance was less than stellar or something was wrong with that particular bottle. Unless we are talking about something crazy from the 1800s or whatever, good bottles of old wine are never daunted by a reasonable decant.
Having drunk my fair share of great bottles of old wine, I really have to disagree with this one.
Sure, “never” is not a good word to use. Rarely or typically is better. But aside from semantics, did I miss your post earlier in the thread where you shared some of your insights from your fair share of old bottles with the OP?
In this thread? No. When I saw this thread, I thought to myself “not this again”.
However, I have a bad track record in keeping my mouth shut when somebody is saying something dumb as a seemingly absolute fact.
If you are interested in my insights on decanting wines, I’m sure you can find tons of older threads where I’ve said my fair share of things on the subject. I didn’t feel like I had to repeat the same things here yet once again.
Jeez man, the guy’s new, if you can’t spare the time to write something, at least you could point him to a couple of old, useful threads…
Other people already did that, didn’t find it particularly useful to re-post the same link once again…
It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure that out 
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Personally I try to avoid decanting, unless:
A question for the experts here:
Why is it that I find a dramatic difference in the decanting/aerating of red wines vs. white wines? In general, I see a bigger transformation as a red opens up with air compared to most whites.
Champagne and many white Burgs excepted, of course.