In this case (although it wasn't shown very well in the article) it does enable a very different architecture: you can generate the code in one data center and have it work on a computer in any other datacenter.

Unless you are google scale you don't need that, so I am on your side (other than HMACS not actually being that difficult to fuck up, compared to e.g just encrypting the entire thing in AES at which point you are hosed).