Thank you for the elaborate and convincing answer.
Second, if you aren't using EE, ice requires a huge cooling system which takes tons and tons of power and resources to build.
The "nothing can beat ice" is pretty invalid considering buckets can be used as well because they don't have an EU cost and the resource costs for building such a system would be much, much less.
Yes, without EE it looks like the design I linked to is not terribly good. However, the problem with buckets is they do not stack and leave an empty bucket. This limits the amount of buckets per tick to however many empty slots you leave, with ice you can pump whole stacks inside.
As such, long story short, ice is not the best cooling in vanilla IC2 after all.