[dev] Why not use the -exec feature of find?

[Greg Reagle]

All over the place (tutorials, manuals, articles, questions and answers) I see 
the advice to use the null feature of find (-print0) and xargs (-0) to be able 
to handle any kind of wacky file name (e.g. filenames with newlines).  Granted, 
*if* you are going to pipe find into xargs, the advice makes sense.  But 
wouldn't it be better in every way to use the -exec (or -execdir) feature of 
find instead of piping into xargs?  Why isn't that the common advice?  Is the 
-exec feature of find fairly new, or fairly new to Posix?