You should do it slowly and correct and in a way that will lead to the best results. The graph is simply showing that if you are building fresh links on a constant basis (which you should do) those links you do lose will ultimately not hurt you because you are keeping up with your fresh links.

This is the kind of attitude I disagree with. Link building should be efficient, not eternal.

Links lose value for many reasons but the links that lose value fastest are the links that depend on cheap, quick link building trends.

As a search engine filters out a class of links, all the value those links passed to other linking resources vanished. A cascade effect sets in and then you see sites gradually lose value over several weeks or months as the search indexes are updated.

Link building should be strategic unless you can produce a regular flow of links without having to take risks or invest a lot of your own time. Most people have no way to set up an autolink program and the majority of autolink programs get filtered out pretty quickly anyway.

So thinking in terms of fewer links rather than more links will pay off better over time.