While the content of Matt's post talked about links, the focus of the post was about crawling on the pages found in the Google index.
What it amounts to is that you really, really need to focus on the quality (and yes, the relevance) of your link partners. Matt mentioned a while ago that it was now easy for Google to determine a link page versus a content page. Now what he appears to be saying is that cruddy links pages will no longer be included in the Google index.
And of course, if your link partners page is not in the Google index, that link is no longer helping you in the SERP's.
There are ways to combat this. You can read about it in this post on new
real estate link building guidelines.