I think it's more accurate to say that "Spectacle is just as important as story," especially if your story takes place in a fictional world.
It's important to give people something exciting, new, different, bizarre, exotic, or unique whenever they go to a theater. You may not always be able to achieve this in your more grounded Romance, Drama, or Comedy films, but it's been done before to great effect. But especially when you're dealing with Fantasy, Scifi, Horror, or Action, it's important to give certain scenes a dramatic and even an iconic set-piece against which to play out your scene: a fantastical location, a unique building, a souped up vehicle, or a bizarre and dangerous creature.
Show something that people haven't seen before, and direct the scene in a way that will not only advance the story, but make the set-piece feel like a real and believable element within the world of your film. However, that last statement is something that I think a lot of film directors and visual-effects teams fail to achieve, as the directors don't always choreograph their actors to react properly to what is happening around them before the effects are added in, and the visual-effects teams are often given orders that go beyond what was shot on set, resulting in a final scene that is disjointed and no longer cohesive: the actors no longer feel like they are reacting to something that is meant to be there, and the effects fail to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality because the effects don't look like are really there, nor do their movements look like they could affect or even harm the characters if that is the intention.
But anyway, should sfx or vfx be more important than story? Certainly not. Should they be equal? In most cases, I don't think so. I think we've found ourselves moving farther and farther away from shooting on live sets or in real locations, which is harming the validity and the realism that films should still have in order to make their stories come across as genuine. Shooting almost an entire film on green-screen or blue-screen, unless for a very stylistic or "small-budget" reason, should not be your first choice.
Higher budget films ought to make an effort to shoot outside of the studio as often as possible because they still have the choice to do so. And only then use vfx to extend environments, expand scenes, and build worlds upon the reality that already exists within the frame. This would also be wise to do with creatures as well.
