It certainly does take away from things for us guitar players if its only for looks and just a board thing. However I thought for the first two albums that really counted though that Forgerty relied on his Kustom with the harmonic clipper. Those albums were certianly covered with pictures of them. I can remember seeing pics of him in concert too with just one Kustom behind him but he had two heads. I suspose in case one of them gave up the ghost. He had a fairly Lennon like 325 Rickenbacker with him a lot then too.
But times have changed and there no new Kustoms to use or stomp boxes on the floor. Its all just to mime to the prerecorded message. There still are a few though who when they appear live they are live stompbox and all. Guys like Ted Nugent come to mind. He is still gonna have a huge Fender set up that will be real, hooked up, and he will have X's marked all over the stage floor because the byrdland will feed back on this note if he stands there on that spot.