You are correct. Directly blocking on accept() in multiple processes does not have the "thundering herd" behaviour. This is good to know.

But this proves next point - select is a poor abstraction. This means that accept() is doing something more then just wait for readability (it attempts round robin) - a thing you can't express with select().

In the article I used the accept() case for illustration of the thundering herd problem. Non-blocking connect() taking a long time makes a good case. The same experiment could be done though measuring write() or sendmsg() syscalls.