That's a sign someone has fundamentally misunderstood Angular and is hacking around their misunderstanding.

Why do you say that? What about it makes it fundamentally misunderstanding?

You should never have to use $scope.digest() unless you're testing a directive. You should never have to fire a digest loop manually.

It's the same thing as using $timeout; It runs a digest at the end after a setTimeout. I wouldn't call it a good practice, but it wouldn't bother me either if I saw it in a codebase. You are also welcome to use things like $evalAsync.

It's not the same thing, as the author points out since using `$timeout` in the example without an isolate scope was the source of the original problem. Instead he's suggesting you use $timeout without it's default behaviour (something that's possible now through the false argument or by calling setTimeout directly).

This is absolutely a leaky abstraction, and whether or not it's necessary sometimes when using Angular, it should still bother you.

No.