Earth’s biodiversity is still so poorly known that only about two million (Bánki et al., 2021) of the estimated nine million or more eukaryotic species (Larsen et al., 2017; Mora et al., 2011) have been described. This puts taxonomists in a race against time to discover biodiversity before it is lost as a result of the Anthropocene mass extinction. Each species description is the result of an often long and time-consuming process that has involved collecting specimens, processing them, discovering their correct place in the tree of life and describing the species and its diagnostic characters from other related species. Currently, about 18,000 species are described each year, which means that species are going extinct at least as fast as they are named (Ceballos et al., 2015; De Vos et al., 2015; Zamani et al., 2021). This ‘taxonomic impediment has been recognized as a serious problem (de Carvalho et al., 2007) and has led to several proposed solutions (e.g., Engel et al., 2021; Rodman & Cody, 2003). In response to the slow and often cumbersome process of describing species, Meierotto et al. (2019) proposed what they later named a ‘minimalist’ approach. They named 18 new species of Costa Rican braconid wasps based almost solely on their consensus COI barcodes while neglecting to give differential diagnoses to those already described species in the same genera that lacked barcodes. This approach was criticized by Zamani et al. (2021), shortly before Sharkey, Janzen, et al. (2021) named 403 braconid species in the same way while also responding to the criticism. Later, Sharkey, Brown, et al. (2021) published a more detailed response in which they defended their approach. The ‘minimalist’ approach has also been recently criticized or commented on by Ahrens et al. (2021), Engel et al. (2021), Fernandez-Triana (2021) and Meier et al. (2021). In this article, we continue this discussion by responding to Sharkey, Brown, et al. (2021). We summarize the main points of concern raised by us (and others) regarding the ‘minimalist’ approach, expand on some points discussed earlier and explain why we think morphology should remain an integral part of species descriptions. To be clear, we oppose the view of Meierotto et al. (2019) and Sharkey, Janzen, et al. (2021) on DNA barcoding as the only source of information for species delimitation and description purposes, and not as a valuable tool in an initial survey of biodiversity.