I interpreted their comment as saying the specific alerts that user receives are useless to them. I definitely agree with that. If enough people feel as we do and turn the alerts off, then yes, I think the system itself does become useless. I don't know how many people turn them off.

This could be avoided by making the implementation less terrible. I don't know how we arrived at the current situation where they're either deafening, or entirely off. It seems really stupid to me that those are the only options. I would prefer to receive them, but it's not worth waking me up at 3 AM for a flooded road 20 miles away.