It seems like every group in the world develops a set of ground rules for itself.
Ground rules are indeed popular, and they've been around for years.
So ground rules have certainly withstood the test of time. The best way to understand ground rules is to think of them as agreements among group members on what kind of team they want to be. All of these behavioral and operational questions should be spelled out in the ground rules. That's the theory. The reality is that nowadays, most groups come up with the blandest, vaguest, boringest ground rules imaginable.