But the article says that the suggestion is to convert them to relaxed loads. Is the expectation to YOLO it and hope that the compiler doesn't break control and data dependencies?

The only place where consume matters is on relaxed but not too relaxed architectures like ARM and POWER, where consume relies on the implicit #LoadLoad of controls and data dependencies.

In a TSO architecture like x86 or SPARC, every "regular" memory load/store is effectively a release/acquire by default. Using release/consume or relaxed provides no extra speedup on these architectures. In weak memory models, you need to add in acquire barriers to get release/acquire architectures. But also, most weak memory models have a basic rule that a data-dependent load has an implicit ordering dependency on the values that computed it (most notably, loading *p has an implicit dependency on p).

The goal of release/consume is to be able to avoid having an acquire fence if you have only those dependencies--to promote a hardware data dependency semantic rule to a language-level semantic rule. For Alpha's ultra-weak model, you still need the acquire fence in this mode, it doesn't help Alpha one whit. Unfortunately, for various reasons, no one has been able to work out a language-level semantics for consume that compilers are willing to implement (preserving data dependencies through optimizations is a lot more difficult than it appears), so all compilers have remapped consume to acquire, making it useless.