Writing for people is nice in theory, but the sad fact is that doing so will cost you traffic and visitors. No matter how high your PageRank is, when someone searches for "write for humans", this page will not come up, at least not very highly, because that exact phrase is not in this post. That is no big loss in this case, but it can be a very big deal elsewhere.

The first thing I learned was to stop writing catchy, clever, titles like pro writers do in real life because search engines hate them. The more plain and basic, the more likely it is to match a search.

You are right that obsessing over SEO is not helpful, but ignoring it is being naive.