What I'd like to do is just grasp the reason for the discrepancy between your experience and my own (and folks I know)? Obviously, changing ports works for you, and not for me, so I'm trying to figure out why. Maybe it's the type of sites you run, how you host them (racked, cloud, home, ...), upstream/provider filtering, where you're located, or something else?
But if people finds you random (not <1024) ssh port, they probably scanned all of you ports? Which seems drastic. Last time I checked, a few years ago, it was not normal to scan all the ports on a large block of IPs. Maybe that changed, but I have never seen that on the few machines and networks I can check.
Anyway, my point is that targeted attacks is a another ballgame, but that does not make it pointless to protect against the dumb, automated attacks.
No, not at all.
But remember what we are talking about here. You said moving ports is "pointless", and I argued that's it's not because it stops a lot of drive-by attacks. Instead of simply acknowledging this, you spent a lot of words arguing a straw-man.