The static IP address networking guide here recommends using interface aliases instead of ip add.

Comments like http://serverfault.com/a/484737 and http://inai.de/2008/02/19 make it seem like a really old deprecated mechanism.

Does anyone use ip add instead?

Either works. I use 'ip addr add' almost exclusively because it's easier to remember, and I can manually set preferred_lft to divert outgoing traffic from such IP addresses, e.g. "ip addr add 2600:3c03::13:3702/64 dev eth0 preferred_lft 0"

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