I completely disagree. I work on a system with multiple servers communicating with each other and billions of events per day. Watching the meters wiggle on all the servers simultaneously is a really important debugging tool. If something slows down or goes down, and you know what it's connected to, it's pretty easy to troubleshoot what the cause is at an incredibly specific level just by looking at the meters.

I think it's likely one's take on whether these tools are useful is very dependent on the system architecture.