Only in specific situations, where the site is using Apache and has .htaccess files enabled. I would argue that using Apache in the first place is non-optimal, but enabling arbitrary .htaccess files for clients is also a potential disaster.

Then again, I suppose there are enough people out there who just want to FTP up their wordpress code and call it a day, so... ugh.

And boy do they, I used to be a shared hosting administrator and sometimes people would do stupid things like create 10MB .htaccess files with the subnets of all of the countries they wanted to block and then would call to complain that their site was loading slow. (Probably not a great idea to parse a config file for every request but at least it exists)