In my experience, the model is very useful when writing a single doc. For questions like "Should we include x", the response can be "No, this is a guide not a tutorial, so the user needs to learn about x somewhere else", or whatever.

I've seen several companies try to follow it pedantically as a structure for their docs (like literally having a sidebar with the four categories) and I've never seen that work out well, for the reasons explained in the article and the other comments here.