De Bruijn's weak diamond property revisited

We first revisit in detail De Bruijn's old proof, providing a few corrections and hints for understanding. We find that this original criterion and proof technique are still worthwhile. Next, we establish that De Bruijn's confluence criterion can be used to derive the decreasing diagrams theorem (the reverse was already known). We also provide a short proof of decreasing diagrams in the spirit of De Bruijn. We finally address the issue of completeness of this method.