Does the meta description still matter?
It does not rank you and never has. What it does is own the couple of lines underneath your result, which is the difference between someone choosing your listing and choosing the one below it. That makes it a conversion tool rather than a ranking one.
What it actually is
It is the pitch that appears under your title in a set of results — the short paragraph telling someone what they will get if they choose you. Unlike most things on this list it is written purely for humans; machines read it, but they read it to show it to a person rather than to judge your page by it.
Why it matters
You can win the hard part and lose the easy one. Getting a page in front of somebody is the expensive work; persuading them to choose it once it is there is comparatively cheap, and this is the only piece of copy that does that job. Leaving it blank means an engine assembles something from your page text, which is sometimes fine and sometimes a fragment of your cookie notice.
What good looks like
A description written for that specific page, long enough to fill the space available without being cut off mid-thought, that says what the page offers and gives a reason to choose it. It reads like a sentence a person wrote, matches what the page actually delivers, and does not simply repeat the title in different words.
Being honest about it
This is the check on our list where we most want to talk you down. It is not a ranking factor, engines frequently replace what you wrote with their own extract, and a site with excellent content and no descriptions will do fine. It earns its place because the upside is real and immediate where it does show, and because writing one is the cheapest work on the entire report.
Where most sites go wrong
The most common failure is one description repeated across every page, usually the company boilerplate, so every listing you appear in makes the same pitch regardless of what someone searched for. The second is the description that was written for a page that has since changed, promising something the page no longer contains — which converts well and then disappoints, which is worse than not converting.