Yes we mentioned that method back in 2010 in quiz 35 where the 2 demos above came from. The main problem with font-size:0 (apart from not quite working in older webkit as mentioned in the quiz) is that it kills the cascade and if you are using em based font-sizes on your children you lose the relationship from the parent div.
In some cases that may not matter if your inline-blocks are just small islands of content and indeed is the method used in bootstrap these days for some inline-block elements.