The discussion started out when people (seemingly, _a lot_ of people) didn't even find the verbcoin: The act of holding down the mouse button was so counter-intuitive to them that it wasn't something they would even try out.
That's a matter of custom.
True to an extent, but that doesn't make the 2 options equal. People who expect to hold down the mouse button will still figure out clicking, but people who expect to click will not necessarily figure out holding the button. That makes the clicking verb-coin superior in my view.
As for the verb-coin itself, I think verb-coin offers some advantages over other multi-verb interfaces. You don't need to move the mouse all over to the bottom of the screen like the lucas arts 9-verb, or to the top of the screen like sierra (or right click a billion times). And verb-coin can contextually disable some of the options, so I won't have "push" or "pull" enabled for the apple core, so it can actually reduce the number of interactions you write, compared to the standard 9-verbs (or, realistically, reducing the number of clicks the player tries, as the developer probably just uses a lot of default responses in 9-verbs).
That's of course, presuming you do have a lot of verbs.
However, if you only have 3 verbs like in the picture above, then it makes a whole lot of sense to just merge talk and interact together and have the 2-click interface, which is simpler and reduces the number of clicks the player needs to make.
I think where verb-coin can truly shine, theoretically at least, is if the actions are completely contextual and dynamic. Meaning that if you have a bible in your inventory and then use the bible on the priest you'll be offered a menu with "give bible to priest", "ask priest about favorite character from the bible", and "knock over priest with bible". This gives you true expressiveness, equal in power only to the text parser, but without needing to guess what was the designer thinking.
I say theoretically, though, because I don't recall seeing any adventure game that actually has a fully dynamic context menu.
People don't even understand a two-click interface any more. I swear some people played through The Fowl Fleet without right clicking on anything (even though it tells you how to do it), and then complained that the puzzles didn't make sense.
Kids today!
It's even worse. I've seen youtubers playing "9 Months In" and not right clicking (and missing vital hints). Youtubers! Those people have played their share of games yet still it didn't even cross their minds that this was an option.
That's why when I wrote "That Damn Dog" I added a timer and if the player does not right click after some time has passed I show a message box with "Did you know? You can right click on stuff". No idea if that worked, though.