Realistically, how often is this functionality used en' mass? I remember using it once or twice throughout my lifetime of using this extension.

An ad blocker is useless to me if I can’t block whatever I want with it.

It's useless if it blocks 99.9% of what you need, but not the custom 0.1% you want on top?

As long as I have an alternative I would never choose the ad blocker that doesn’t let me block the elements I want.

For most websites I don’t care but there are many websites that I visit very often and removing annoying or useless elements and padding is practically mandatory at this point - I wouldn’t want to go back to not being able to do it.

So, answering your question, yes, “useless” was hyperbole.

I use different extensions for blocking individual elements on pages, like sticky headers or other custom divs. They're still working fine, e.g.:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/click-to-remove-ele...

also you'd think that the pushers of this agenda would get real-time updates to things like block lists metadata. God knows they do it themselves several times a day...