Yes, they would. I guess there was a downside to moving that method elsewhere after all. To mitigate that you can make a quick method to check the value of the banned_id in the users row and return a bool then run this via a "hook" to check the value on each page call.
And yes, those examples are outdated. I am nearly done with the new version, it's coming along really nicely and hope to have it booted out the door soon.