Responsive Line Breaks by Dan Mall

Daniel Mall:

I often come across the problem of widows and orphans when using fully fluid grids, so here are 2 techniques I use to avoid them as much as possible.

Daniel Mall presents two techniques for responsive line breaks. I definitely run into problems with line breaks in my responsive design workflow, so I think I might use his first approach some day.
He points out that he uses the second technique but I don’t see the advantage there. The first one looks far simpler to me – with the same result.
What do you think?