Is it just me, or are all the proposed solutions more complicated than the original one?!! This article actually convinces me that I should continue to use the <br> tag.

The point of doing all that is to future-proof your site on the off chance that browsers will render things correctly during our lives. Whether or not it is worth it is for you to decide.

The sad truth is that there's really no elegant solution to this problem. To make matters worse, the author's proposed solutions are only moving mark-up garbage from one place to another; they don't do much to improve the quality of code.