I can't believe that this old, old kerfuffle is still doing the rounds!
The "monitored approach" - call it what you will, if that's important to you - was well established when I joined BEA in the early sixties. IIRC it started around the turn of the decade: after too many bent airframes a cadre of trainers and management were sent away to a hotel and told to remain there until they had analysed the failures and come up with a solution.
Part of the problem was the fact that approaches were hand flown or coupled to what are now seen as primitive autopilots to very low limits, and go-arounds were far more common than what is acceptable today.
What came out of the deliberations was a fail-safe philosophy: the PH would fly the approach and go-around at decision height (QFE was used.) If -IF - the captain was satisfied that he had the runway and was in a satisfactory position to land (remember many approaches were non-precision, GCAs, radio ranges etc) he would interrupt the planned go-around and land.
The icing on the cake was that, freed from the mechanical business of handling the thing the captain had more mental capacity to manage the operation.
It works very well but no-one would argue that with the digital avionics that are the norm today it is necessarily the last word.