I'm of the opinion that it's not

To me it's reading from different perspectives and other's writing style. It's really important when it comes to political stuff or anything else that you need to base a decision on.

But I think it applies even just to plain articles about a niche you follow.

Like, maybe some new GPU features get released for Linux or something. Gamingonlinux might cover it from a Gaming perspective whereas Phoronix might focus more on the hardware aspect of things and the original blog post or changelog or whatever might just give a mostly a list of changes and a description.