I've read some of Stout's books also. I think one just needs to take what she says and then adapt it to one's conditions.

Most of my garden is mulched. There seems to be a few things that take awhile to grow [or a lack of the proper mulch] for me to get them mulched. So sometimes the soil is bare.

For some things like lettuce I start indoors in containers and then transplant.

As far as the 8 inch depth is concerned that seems a bit hard to maintain because it's always contracting. That said I need more mulch now but I've been waiting until after the 4th of July because I do have a bit of worry about stray bottle rockets landing in my straw/mulch.

To direct seed in a garden mulched as Ruth Stout would you will need to pull the mulch back from the planting row until the seeds germinate and those sprouts grow some so you can put the mulch back.

Okay, Ruth Stout gardened in the day when you planted a row of lettuce, thinned to 6 inches between plants, but had 2 feet between rows. With that kind of garden, I can see pulling back the mulch to soil level down the row and seeding as she directed. But I plant in wide beds, 6 inches between plants, so I mulch the whole bed a couple of inches deep (I use pine straw, as I live in a pine forest), then use a dibble to open up a whole in the mulch, maybe widen it with my fingers, and then drop the seed in to the soil. I just did this with some spinach (we're going into our cool, rainy season here, so spinach works, really).

For carrots, though, I clear the bed, make furrows about 3 inches apart with my yardstick, carefully seed 1-2 inches between seeds, wait for the carrots to come up, and then put narrow bunches of pine straw between the rows of carrots. I grow my carrots for fall/winter harvest, so they get mulched pretty deeply by the time frost comes around, and they just keep growing up out of it.