You can't just 'consume and digest' any paper that you come across. It's like trying to drink from a firehose. Assuming you already have a field of interest, I recommend looking at the last few years of the top conferences and journals in that field. That will give you what's trendy right now, of course. To find 'landmark papers' in a field, one way is looking at suggested readings from (possibly graduate) course websites (e.g. from OCW) in the topic of interest.
I do agree with you here, trying to consume and digest everything that comes out in one's field of interrest is not only pretty hard but also extensively time consuming.
I guess the point of the article is more to, induce people into considering more academic papers when they do research -- that is, either for their own non-academic or academic research.
I always find it interesting to read those, when they're closely related to what I'm trying to do or what I am currently doing / researching.
And as far, as trying to catch-up with a whole field of interest, often enough, there are books -- written by the same researchers that wrote the papers you missed -- that presents you the latest advancement in the field over the past years ; all the while presenting you the way of thought that accompanies these discoveries... A good example of that would be "Burst" by A.-L. Barabási, a personal favorite :)
