This is pretty much true on a per page basis, but advanced SEO becomes less of a page optimization campaign and more about strategziing such that the business has positive results regardless of the performance of individual words or pages.
Look at it this way: having an exact match means you're committing yourself to the search term, either by being first to it or by spending a lot of money to buy the domain from whomever was first. Either is likely to be a signal of quality. Near match, however, just means you had $8 to spare. (For similar reasons, cheap-domain.com or cheapdomain.biz do not receive any bonuses.)
Exact match domains also crush backlinks.