Well, I too think meta tags on your page still serves an important purpose hence better to have them than not, just in case.

Meta tags do sure have an importance for your site , I think that a page is complete only when having this tags as a part of it.

Yes, the top search engine do not consider the meta tags but there are literally thousands of smaller search engine where meta tags are still considered as an important factor so why not use them?

Now a days top search engines do not consider meta tags as an important factor. But still if meta tags are used in proper position then they can be helpful to increase the traffic as there are millions of smaller search engines who still give them some importance.

everyone seems to agree on this, so let me pose a contrasting comment. most of the smaller search engines are powered by the top 3. and meta tags actually increase page loading time (because there's more coding on the page), which would be bad for the very small minority of hyper-slow internet users, and also the page loading times are taken into account by the big engines' crawlers.

I agree with you but its a good practise to use meta tag and it will take onle few byte load to your site

meta tags do and don't help your site. they'll not improve its rankings one bit. they do sort of point the spider in the right dircetion of keyprds to rank your site for though.