And one last thing. Our ancestors tilled the soil most likely because they had no idea what no-till gardening is. Also, they didn't have newspaper.
If you think no-till is a bunch of hippy bull****, fine. In reality, it's a great way to make a bed with less work and without buying topsoil that only requires a little bit of preparation ahead of time.
No-till isn't BS at all. Everyone's goal is to create rich loose weed-free topsoil one way or another. You can do that by tilling and amending the existing soil, or by essentially creating new soil on top of the existing stuff. You can also just re-seed a harvested field with few modifications save a top dressing of fertilizer, which is what many farmers do, especially in developing countries. For them, the loss in yield is more than made up by the savings in the cost of tilling and irrigation.
On a small scale, few people actually do what no-till farmers in South American and Africa are doing. Instead, we do something similar to lasagna gardening, essentially recreating rich loose soil (eerily similar to tilled soil) on top of the existing untilled soil. For hops, even the tillers among us are digging a deep hole, amending it with compost, and topping it off with mulch, essentially creating a lasagna garden in the ground.
I've just never seen a convincing reason to do either version of no-till at home. Of course, no-till is less work if you're comparing it to tilling by hand. Hey, if I didn't have access to a roto-tiller, you can bet I'd do no-till every time! But if you're at a very small scale, like a backyard hop garden, then you can easily dig holes by hand.
As for the benefits to the soil / environment, I haven't seen any rigorous evidence to back up this claim. Moreover, no-till advocates typically don't address the disturbance to soil microbiota brought about by covering the topsoil with cardboard and mulch, which deprives surface microbes (along with the weeds) of oxygen, heat, and access to water. Building up soil vertically essentially moves the soil surface further away, forcing soil microbes to shift upward the way global warming forces plants to move up a mountainside. Neither do no-till advocates typically address the possibility that the soil aeration brought about by tilling actually prevents anaerobic soil denitrification, thereby decreasing the fertilizer requirements of tilled land. But this is just reasoning, not really backed up by any evidence. The only rigorous evidence one way or the other (that I've come across so far), is the clear benefit of tilling to the heart and lungs of the tiller!
Lastly, no-till is not something we Westerners invented in the 20th century. Here is Virgil in part 1 of The Georgics
Then thou shalt suffer in alternate years
The new-reaped fields to rest, and on the plain
A crust of sloth to harden; or, when stars
Are changed in heaven, there sow the golden grain
Where erst, luxuriant with its quivering pod,
Pulse, or the slender vetch-crop, thou hast cleared,
And lupin sour, whose brittle stalks arise,
A hurtling forest. For the plain is parched
By flax-crop, parched by oats, by poppies parched
In Lethe-slumber drenched. Nathless by change
The travailing earth is lightened, but stint not
With refuse rich to soak the thirsty soil,
And shower foul ashes o'er the exhausted fields.
Thus by rotation like repose is gained,
Nor earth meanwhile uneared and thankless left.
The reduction in yield farmers now see with no-till methods is potentially larger than the yield reductions farmers experienced in Virgil's time (due to intense crop selection in academic breeding programs), so perhaps no-till was even more common back in the day. But the earliest depictions of agriculture by humans clearly show plowing and tilling. There had to be some reason the Sumerians and Egyptians went to all that trouble, and it was likely the same reason people still till their land: yield.