I certainly understand and agree with your position, in most cases, but there are some instances when a firewall serves an excellent purpose. As an example, we manage hundreds of heterogeneous servers where customers also have administrative access to the devices. As such, we can never be sure they haven't changed something that can negatively impact the security of the server or servers.
Firewalls do have a purpose and I don't think anyone disputes that. I certainly have firewalls in my network. What I believe the argument here is about is which kinds of traffic does one use a firewall for and which kinds of traffic are best left to other devices to handle access control/management. And I don't believe anyone is necessarily advocating exposing individual servers directly to the internet either. There are other devices that can handle isolation of the servers and protect them against such things as syn floods.