If you are counting on the circuit through an 8' ground rod through 100 feet of sand to 10 feet of #6 stapled to a pole to clear a fault, I hope you are on a small breaker.
It sounds more like a worm chaser to me.

Back in my younger day, when I was foolish and inexperienced, I could run an entire house on the grounding electrode system (during hot check). It actually worked.

I bet, back in your younger days, the GES was a metal water piping system that spanned the city.
Now it is likely to be a Ufer at best and could just be a couple of rods that struggle to get 15 or 20 ohms to the sand. It takes a GES with less than 6 ohms to trip a 20a breaker and that won't cook off for a while. I bet a 20a bolted fault into a rod would cook off the water and increase in resistance before the breaker tripped.
Your only hope would be if your rod was in the ground water ... but then it may have corroded away in a few years.

This would be a good study for one of these university engineering departments. Send the students out with real ground performance equipment and evaluate the GES in various buildings around town. Pull some rods that have been in the ground for 10-15 years and see what you have. Inspect the clamps.

I bet, if the FBC really looked at that study we would be doing CadWelds on rods, banning steel core rods and certainly requiring something in addition to a rod or two. I know for a fact that the 15 year old clamp on the rod at this house was not working when I moved in and there was only the one rod.

You bet wrong. Back in 89 and still to this day, Pasco County did not have metal water piping systems that span anywhere. In fact, you didn't even have 10' of metal piping underground.

It was a ground rod only. Works rather well, even in sand. I bet a UFER works even better.

I am just basing my thoughts on the "ground shift" I have seen between buildings when you start stringing data cables between them. It becomes evident very quickly that "ground" is not "zero volts". That becomes particularly evident with transients and surges during lightning events.

Data cables are a bear.
Especially between buildings but you also are dealing with the internal grounding of each cable in the nic cards. Which are internal to each device which is powered by many different branch circuits.
So the impedance is different between all of the devices.

I guess that is why the IT people tried to start just driving ground rods everywhere.

Ground rods are a waste of money in these cases. Bonding is the trick. Make all the grounding electrodes in all of the buildings one big GES and you have something.
In our case (IBM) we did not have access to the service without triggering complaints by everyone from the IBEW to the electrical inspector so we bonded the machine cases with black wire and called it a "drain", a carefully chosen, ambiguous term.
One of the first places where that was done on LANs was at the old Holiday Inn in Ft Myers on the water front (3 buildings merged into one over the years). A lot of the original work was done by Sate Farm in Winter Haven. The IBM IPR guy in Tampa came up with the "drain". We built off of their work.
With various types of surge protection devices and better bonding we took a situation where we were getting several lightning damage calls a day in the summer down to a couple a year.