Exactly! theverge.com suffering from this problem too. When I visit that website, I want to see what's new. But I see a mangled mess of different articles that are not sorted.
He even goes on to say, "Your homepage isn't a gallery". Well, if your website is a gallery (in this case, a gallery of articles), then it doesn't apply. It's also the reason why newspapers have the same "gallery style" layout: http://i.imgur.com/4xCCE2B.jpg
I find the issue isn't grids, but whether you start designing your site with the intent of the chrome around your content being cool, or your content to be usable. All decisions flow from there.