I agree with you, with the caveat that to the extent that dogs are like children, they can be well-behaved children but they're never going to become adults and so spoiling them doesn't have the same negative consequences that spoiling a human child would.

My dog actually knew a bunch of different commands including "come" that he would obey as part of playtime (he could even walk on his hind legs, which always impressed people) but I don't think he was temperamentally suited to ever being loose around anything dangerous. He would forget everything and start running as fast as he could whenever he saw squirrels and certain other small animals, so it was up to me to tie him securely to my wrist whenever we went outside.

Some people are going to think "this guy doesn't know how to train a dog if he couldn't train his dog not to chase squirrels" but I promise you that I've met other dogs and my dog wasn't like most of them. I'm not saying he was necessarily impossible to train. (How would I know?) However, he was more impulsive than any other dog I've met, including untrained puppies. People would assume he was less than one year old even when he was actually nine.