While there are plenty of people trying to minimize feedings for various reasons, so many kinds of fish can probably survive fine with reduced feedings, I would caution you at trying to apply human trends to different kinds of organisms - there are some kind of fish that this is quite unhealthy for and which will not cope well with it (anthias and some active planktivores come to mind).
While I don't know if there is a substantial body of scientific study saying that some benefit comes from fasting in humans (and I have no intention of debating it either way), the historical/evolutionary background to humans supports the idea that we evolved to be capable of fasting and being fine afterwards with the relative sparsity of food available to us in the early periods of humanity and sudden availability that came from hunting and such supports intermittent fasting as a 'normal' eating schedule for humans.
This isn't the case in a reef environment, where at literally any time of day, there is an abundance of food available in the water column, so many of the organisms that live in a reef have evolved with near constant availability of their food source, and as a result may not be evolutionarily predispositioned to acclimate well to periods without food. Of course, everything will do this on some time scale (minutes, hours, sometimes days), and it varies wildly between species, but it should not be considered an expectation that reef organisms will be able to fast for a day or more by default, since they are often not ever required to in their home environment. Many organisms that we aquarists don't usually keep but which are plentiful in reefs are actually these animals that require a constant food supply to graze on, or a large quantity of a specific diet available to them, and our inability to maintain a constant food supply in the tank makes them unsuitable for us to keep.
It's also worth mentioning that digestive tract problems are also much more likely to be cause by the available food - in the wild there can be a massive variety and lots of live foods, which many aquarists offer neither. Knowing the diet of your animals and providing something that suits them is critical to their long term health, and varying their diet is likely a key component to that too. Fish digestive tracts are often fairly inefficient at extracting nutrients from their food, which lends some additional evidence that food being available regularly is important for them to be able to eat enough to get what they need.
On the opposite side of the scale, I feed my tank heavily, twice a day, with phytoplankton in the morning and evening, and I've got a bunch of healthy fish and a few spawning pairs of things that regularly produce eggs or larvae in pretty good quantities - which I think is an indicator of animal health. This nearly opposite approach can still produce good results, as I haven't seen any signs of distress, constipation, loss of coloration, or other indicators that would point towards a problem.
