I don't follow. Graphite doesn't "throw anything away". You define your own retention policy and Graphite follows it. You're free to maintain 1-second resolution for 50 years, if you have the storage capacity for it. But that isn't what this article is about.

The example covers a particular metric use-case for annotation-style details, and how to extract a meaningful aggregate from what is otherwise contextual data. Personally I love that Graphite lets me "hack about" with multiple functions. But I'm a data whore, YMMV. ;-)