For leisure walks with wide/normal lenses <50mm, sure.
For documentary work with an 800mm, with only ~10ft of depth of field from a couple hundreds of feet away [1], focus still matters.
You can definitely see how deep the DoF was in the shots in the article; it makes sense that Widener was more concerned about the shutter speed than the focus. I was just arguing that the zone/hyperfocal focus techniques just wouldn't be very useful here, considering he's far enough away and using an SLR. Close quarters with a manual rangefinder and "f8 and be there" would suffice.
[1] https://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html