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The feeling of visceral disdain debaters have and targets of their disdain hardly are evidence whether the argument is worthy.
I think there exists plenty of theoretical literature on whys and hows why our laws of war are such as they are, if one would search for it. My personal intuition is that it comes down to cold raw game theory calculus from Clausewitz and has only a little to do with fairness. The purpose of the war is to achieve goals, and such goals are political in nature, like everything else in the affairs of states. If you attack the enemy's military forces (name that is latched to their primary war capabilities) and win, you render your enemy less capable to achieve their political goals, including their ability to resist your ability achieve your own goals. After a decisive battle or a series of them and utter destruction of enemy's capability to fight, you have control over territory and the population. You may redraw borders, force a change of government, force evacuation of population or property, all because you have territorial control and thus can install an occupying force to enforce your will. It makes the attacks against military targets appear neutral: what you do after victory depends on what you will. The aim and goals of victr may be just, unjust, or in between, they are are up to decision makers of respective belligerent. The method of war itself is much more constrained by the technological capabilities.
A terror attack against soft civilian targets alone, at the usual levels of seriousness and scale, won't itself affect the enemy's primary capability fight a war, which makes it capricious. You will not achieve territorial control with a regular terror attack against civilians, because by definition, the civilians have not military capability to oppose you and the enemy's hardened military capability has not lost a battle, thus it is still present. You are essentially no longer fighting the enemy but blackmailing the enemy, betting that they won't stomach the slaughter and cede the political goal out of their own volition from their moral considerations. Thus terror attacks against civilians appear ethically distasteful by the method alone. (Specifying "usual level" as weapons of mass destruction or conventional means taken to extreme level, to destruction of whole economic base or genocidal destruction of population, can have military effect, but such effects are difficult to achieve without involving military forces. And if you start including military targets, logistics and industries in your terror attack, then it is properly called a guerilla campaign, and it is considered more acceptable in laws of war, though the line is murky and propagandists' brush wide.)
The laws of war offered one thing missing from all previous wars: a means for a loser to have a just peace. Adversaries who win justly allow a faction in the losing party to sell peace to their populace. Vae victus and all, but woe turns to bitterness morphing into revanchism instead of acceptance when the war is prosecuted 'unfairly'. Russians didnt give that much of a shit about Afghans that ground down soldiers, Americans seem fine with Vietnam and even Iraqis despite COIN being a fucking shitfest, even Jordan and Egypt are cool with Israel now. That is because the 'winning' entities did not (at large scale) engage in indiscriminate and militarily dubious acts we term 'war crimes'. However if we were to go to parties with long standing grudges, the things that always stand out are 'unjust' massacres against civilians. Palestinians now against Israelis, Ukrainians against Russians, everyone in Eastern Europe against Russians, like 40% of Arab tribes against the goatfuckers in the next valley.... thats a grudgin.
Oh, as for direct military value: ambushes are fine, ambushes from within civilian areas are bad because the ambusher gets civs killed by removing the nominal protection otherwise offered. Chem and bio warfare are mutually destructive. Only one that needs a major update is dazzlers, but I can assure members of this board that dazzler tech has reached levels WP level of fuckery. Next big ones gonna be a doozy.
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