i think those articles are actually perpetuating a myth that IOS is almost perfect at handling its memory management.
Please see the following straight from apple development:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/Man agingMemory/Articles/MemoryAlloc.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001881-SW1
Like the system applications, your applications should always handle low-memory warnings, even if they do not receive those warnings during your testing. System applications consume small amounts of memory while processing requests. When a low-memory condition is detected, the system delivers low-memory warnings to all running programs (including your application) and may terminate some background applications (if necessary) to ease memory pressure. If not enough memory is released—perhaps because your application is leaking or still consuming too much memory—the system may still terminate your application.
For memory allocated using the malloc library, it is important to free up memory as soon as you are done using it. Forgetting to free up memory can cause memory leaks, which reduces the amount of memory available to your application and impacts performance. Left unchecked, memory leaks can also put your application into a state where it cannot do anything because it cannot allocate the required memory.
Basically the bottom line is although IOS is good at handling its memory there will be apps that are coded badly which leak memory and or very memory intensive that do not play well with others. i.e. like below:
An article referencing that there is issue that closing apps, especially safari for instance is beneficial:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/11/ios-8-1-1-iphone-4s-and-ipad-2-a-little-fas ter-kind-of-sometimes/
so yes sometimes it IS necessary to close all the apps for a 'refresh' and btw IOS already provides this functionality with the up swipe in task manager, all I want is a one click solution!