Those and the similar capacitative or inductive proximity sensors are great for things like limit and home switches. There was a demo video posted on the forum quite a few years ago showing how consistent they were. However, I would not use one as a replacement for a 3D sensor as they are not going to pick up fine detail. My 3D printer uses one to check bed level but of course that is sensing against a flat object which is ideal.

I have a fairly cheap and cheerful 3D probe that came with my second-hand CNC mill so when I needed to probe and map a surface to replicate a raised design, I just made a new probe for it with a relatively sharp tip to be able pick up detail, especially close up to almost vertical edges of features. I rewrote the probing macro (under Mach3 which I was using at the time) to speed things up a bit and it all worked pretty well. A sensor like the one shown would not have done the job.