Heh, I guarantee you that Harriers in the Falklands used "viffing"... as an administrative maneuver. The Harrier family has a whole menagerie of weird and wonderful TVC party tricks that are notoriously difficult to pull off, need a bunch of excess altitude as a backstop for when things inevitably go wrong, and generally aren't applicable to air-to-air combat.

All that said, I agree with you that it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme. Supermaneuverability has certainly expanded the envelope of potential post-stall maneuvers (and, more importantly, dramatically reduced pilot workload in those regimes) far beyond what the Harrier is capable of, but outside of the airshow circuit it continues to remain a solution in search of a problem.

"Fighter pilots HATE him! Learn this one weird trick that the bandits don't want you to know about and win 100% of your BFM engagements!" If only it were that easy...