What the discussion does show though is that there are two groups out there.
That may be an over-simplification.
There are purely-VFR pilots, and IMHO most of those don't fly if the weather is less than pretty nice, so they won't worry about the pitot heat.
In fact, I don't think a single plane I flew in for my PPL training had a working pitot heater; I always checked the thing for getting warm (as I was told) but it was never significantly warm, whereas my TB20 pitot tube will literally set fire to the plastic cover on it in under a minute or two, and after 30 secs cannot be touched by hand. The schools obviously don't want to spend the £200 on a new tube.
Then you have IFR pilots, most of whom won't fly with significant defective equipment, and rightly so. Single pilot IFR can be hard enough work without putting a banana skin under your feet before even departing...
There is also the slight legal issue of departing with faulty equipment which is a required carriage in the flight manual for night VFR or IFR.
A pitot tube is really cheap to replace so should be fixed without question.
Sure one can fly and land without the ASI but one can get significant errors at temps approaching 0C even in VMC, but these won't initially be obvious so why mess with this at all? I can't see the point. Would one depart with a load of cockroaches bunging up one's static vents? One doesn't need an altimeter to fly and land, either.