I did NOT mean it was useless, I am sorry for the poor wording on a longer article. What I meant is that having more monero nodes have a benefit to end-users syncing their XMR wallets as a CDN. So having a node requirement with the miner was one of the community suggestions. Proof of "useful" work in this case. As opposed to purely solving math problems.

The point here is that if people are duking it out with buying more and more hash power, then those resources should ALSO include a node which benefits the end-user. It's not "mine or node", the suggestion was "mine + node".