tonedeaf, I wouldn't call ultra-precise matching a requirement by any means, but it is certainly an advantage for stereo recording with coincident or closely spaced main microphones.
By the way, when I mentioned earlier that the more serious manufacturers would prefer if they could make microphones with even greater consistency than they do now, there is also an interesting contrary viewpoint which I've come across, especially among aficionados of "vintage" microphones. As you may know, there are people who practically worship certain older designs such as the Neumann U 47, M 49 and M 50, KM 54 and U 67, the Schoeps M 221 B, and the AKG C 12 and Telefunken Ela M 250 and 251.
But for each engineer or producer who swears up and down that no microphone made today is in the same league as these classics, you will usually find that they own one or a few of these microphones which they have particularly become fond of, and it's only those particular examples that they mean. As a thought experiment, if I could bring together, say, the twelve or fifteen most outspoken devotees of these microphones and have them put all their individual microphones on a table, then if I scrambled up whose microphone was whose and returned them, those people would probably hang me from the nearest lamppost in short order.
What this comes down to is that if someone is looking for a particular sound quality which is not exactly the "center line" of the microphone's tolerance field, then if production tolerances are wider, that person has a greater likelihood of finding a microphone they really like than if all the microphones of that type sound the same.
It also implies what I think is the truth in this case: If companies such as Neumann or AKG could re-issue the old microphones exactly as they were made in the past (something which some people loudly and insistently demand), many of the most ardent fans of vintage microphones would dislike the result--because what they really like isn't the sound quality which that type of microphone was originally intended to have, and (on average) did have; instead, they like an individually altered version of that sound quality which happens to have come about due to the more or less random circumstances of component tolerances and aging in the particular instance(s) of their own favorite microphone(s).
--best regards