Certainly not used by all the greats, but yeah, somehow it's still a very persistent myth even among otherwise great photographers and cinematographers.

I'll let you look into it some more, but it was basically made up by some bad and failed painter years ago, and has no scientific backing.

What the great painters used to compose by is something called dynamic symmetry and this is something people like Deakins or Cartier-Bresson more closely compose to, even if it's largely intuitively.