True, if your definition of "SHTF" is only "massive, region or nation wide calamity or collapse."
There's a whole lot of gray area between that and "normal", even more localized disasters (weather events, wildfires out in the sticks or on the edge of town, extended power outages) where they're totally appropriate for a situation where the shit has totally hit the fan, just maybe not to the point to where the zombies are chewing on the door knobs.
Which is a long way of saying, they're useful in a whole lot of real world situations that might not reach the level of a massive, metro-wide (or worse) problem, but which someone is a lot more likely to encounter in reality than those larger scale problems.