I've only used flow control when booting systems like solaris on a serial console or other embedded hardware. Almost never for a tty session. I'm almost always saving output to a file and looking at that. Or using less +F or tmux etc... so yeah.

So my use of never might be hyperbolic, but it is a figure of speech. I can count on one hand with fingers leftover how often I've "needed" flow control. So just like in math, 0.99999 is equivalent functionally to 1 in this case.