Because it used to be the way and they've caught on enough and the algorithm is smart enough to change and reflect this now. It ranked hard for many and it's good for churn and burn still, but for reputable clients is going to be a death sentence very shortly.
I think you might be missing the point of what SkyrocketSEO is trying to say.
Did you know google actually de-valued exact match anchors a little while ago and gave more power to longtail anchors with exact keywords in it (these anchors were actually killing it for a little while), and then they reverted it back after about a month? There are some case studies on this if you search around.
There is also a kind of relationship between the amount of exact anchors going into a page and it's on page keyword usage. Every anchor going into a page is an "exact anchor" for something. What makes a related anchor different from an exact, is the usage of that keyword on the targeted page. I agree that the old way of trying to rank pages for a single keyword is slowly dying, but as long as exact match anchors hold weight (and they still hold a lot - google even increased the weight of it after they took it away for a while), it will continue to work. People need to start ranking pages based on themes/topics as opposed to a single keyword. In this sense, I can have a ton of "exact anchors" going into a page, but the anchors are all different from each other.
For my own sites, exact match keywords are working better than ever. I can't use as many of them as I used to, but each time I use it, it carries the most ranking power of any anchor text. What I believe Skyrocket is trying to say is, if they don't work anymore, why would google penalize for someone using it? Of course it's going to take more effort in the future to use them, but as it stands now, they will still hold a lot of weight. For example, google penalizes SAPE links, and people proclaim that SAPE links are ineffective now.... WRONG, sape links are still very powerful, you just have to know how to properly use them. Just like exact anchors, they are still powerful, you just need to know how to use them (and understand the on-page - off-page optimization relationship).
If exact match anchors were no longer effective, what purpose would google be serving by penalizing people who overuse it? They put measures in place to stop things from being overused because they know it works. Kind of like google targeting guest posts... ask yourself why? Because they work!
Also, people need to stop looking at what google is doing to the seo authority figures or sites in the spotlight. It's all propaganda to win the fight before it's even begun. If more people tested things out for themselves, they would realize that when a big site gets slapped for a "bad practice", it does not mean smaller sites will get slapped too (it is just to set an example so people stay away from it). Think about it, what's the easiest way to show the seo world that guest posts don't work anymore? Slap a site that a lot of people follow that's using it (it's like taking out the general in an army).
A lot of times when google can't defeat a problem in reality, all they have to do is crush it in the minds of SEO's. They did an awesome job with SAPE. People are afraid to even touch it now... yet it works as powerful as ever
I've always said, stay 1 step ahead of google OR 1 step *behind*.
