I find the articles above assume very little sophistication on behalf of people checking their rankings and because they do it in such a stupid way then therefore checking for rankings is pointless. I think it would have been more useful to argue that if you don't do it right then it's pointless.
"people" may not, but "SEOs" certainly do. The thing is, WHY do YOU need to know? You can tell if your site is being shown to people by looking at the site logs.
Are YOU actually going to use Google to find your site???
What are you going to do if Google doesn't show "your site" in one search but does for the same search an hour later?
SEOs expect the 'home' page of every site they work on to 'rank' for every 'key' word or phrase, people want to find ANY URL that looks as if if may be a match for their query.
SEO "experts" ARE stupid and have little sophistication, they have this dumb idea that they can
know EXACTLY how search works from looking at one tiny little aspect of 'rankings'. The question that is STILL most frequently asked is "Where have my rankings gone"
TEN years ago when everybody using Google were shown exactly the same results 'rank checking' was 'useful'; up to a point, but these days when Google will show a "pattern" searcher "different" results just because they can, it simply causes confusion.
SEOs do not understand the newly discovered or updated URLs WILL ALWAYS be shown in the top five or six results for that particular datacentre (or server) and they mistake this for indicating that Google 'prefers' "fresh" or "updated" content.