I find that I tend to leave my aperture wide open by default and only stop-down when I consciously want a deeper DOF image.
If you had been a professional photographer you would have sold one copy of your second image using shallow DOF, stop down a bit and you would have sold eight or nine.
No criticism of the picture, just the observation that shallow DOF can remove context from the image, so the child at the microphone is the star of the show because he has been picked out, but stop down and the child at the microphone even though forward in the frame is as sharp as the others, so they are all equally starring in the show. I don't know what the actual case was, one star or all stars.
It is similar with almost anything else that can be photographed. A blurred background and foreground isolates the main subject from the surroundings so I need to decide 'do I need those surroundings to tell the story or add context to the image', and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I wouldn't do one thing or the other exclusively, shallow or deep DOF, because then it becomes an affectation, style for style's sake and it ignores the needs of the photograph. Worse is to make the blurred background the subject of the picture, so comments you read on internet forum's like 'great bokeh' without mentioning the subject or composition would say to me the photograph has failed miserably. But f/16 can add depth to the picture in more ways than simply making everything sharp. It is part of the 'democratic' style, it allows many things within the frame to interact without overt interference from the bought in style of shallow DOF. Hence you have the failed ethos of the early 20th century Pictorialists who used style and photographic effects exclusively, and the breakaway movement of the realists in Edward Weston, Strand etc. who saw that content should be the important element.
So, yes or no? It depend's. For cases where shallow DOF in particular is a choice and not a necessity it shouldn't be used indiscriminately, it just shows lack of thought if there is no variation in approach
across different subjects and says to me the photographer doesn't care about the subject of the photograph as much as he or she cares about superficial style.
Steve