What about for microcontrollers? I've seen some sequences of fairly specific capacitor values for 3.3V power in some microcontroller datasheets, and I always wondered how much that mattered.
The basic answer is basically what the original article says. If you don't want the mental burden of figuring it out, the spec gives you safe defaults that should work for almost all uses. But it's almost never the case that you need to do it that way.