Does anyone (i.e google) still use meta tags? I thought it was all about links from other sites these days? I'm happy to be corrected on this

Recently spent quite a bit of time on research on this...and essentially...don't worry too much about META tags. A lot of search engines (e.g. google) mostly ignore them. I think one of the search engine engines ( ! ) still pays attention to meta tags - but not to the extent where it would drastically alter your page ranking.
I think also it's generally perceived that if you have meta tags - they should directly relate to the content on that page (i.e. not general for the whole site)
The general gist from what I found out was that if your site has META tags - don't worry about removing them, but if your site doesn't have them - it's not the end of the world and you should spend hours and hours researching what to put in them etc.
(There's also a lot of contention about how to include the keywords etc. e.g. seperated by a space, semi-colon, comma, comma + space etc. etc. so it's a fairly vague standard)
The most important thing is to make sure that the content of the page is relevant.