Yes, but no. Those are talking about singular proxy points for singular applications, as provided by a singular vendor. They're mostly talking about a proxy that acts like a data former and sanitizer before it hits the actual service - not a "10 year old application with different formats and expired certs on a device that couldn't even handle the CPU cycles needed for the current applicaton" case. The proxies described in the articles all are proxies that clean up data before passing it on, or where the vendor wants to take advantage of new features on the calling device but doesn't want to re-write the backend of the service. That's just SOP for the modern web, you want some sort of gateway that prevents problems from getting in your server, be it from malicious intent or corrupt data. Your solution only works if the vendor wants to support old applications (they don't) or some third party is writing a proxy for a single use case, without the vendor's input. That isn't happening. The vendor has already provided a new application, so they don't care either.