I use wayfinder in the same way I would do it by hand. In both cases I use unordered <ul> lists to build the menu and css to style it. And in both cases I use the "active" class to set the current here state. Ironically I used the "active" class from before I started with MODx so it was very easy to make the transition.
In most cases I can get away with the standard default output from wayfinder, which is a simple <ul> structure with the default classes (active, first, last). It is amazing how far you can go with this simple structure.
As for the ALA article, this is exactly how Wayfinder does it (in theory, wayfinder does so much more). It is an interesting method but there are others that don’t need any php. For example you could specify a specific ID to use in the body tag tha call the here state based on the ID. This will not require any PHP since it is pure CSS. You could probably find a simple way to do it with javascript as well.
I could imagine using a hand codded menu for sections that will never change in order to save a little on processing.
