Agreed. It's become nothing more than another line item to point to clients (or to the C-suite if you're in-house) to say how much progress an SEO campaign has supposedly made. But that's important to a lot of folks, particularly clients who're trying to measure the ROI of SEO efforts in the same manner as their paid program(s). Finding out it has little importance for them would be like finding out Santa Claus isn't real.