Some background: I recall becoming much more adept at the concepts of area and measurement during high school geometry. However, as I scour the Common Core standards, "area" only shows up in high school standards when talking about the sectors of a circle. I could also argue that concepts of area and surface area must be understood in order to perform the majority of modeling tasks, but it is not explicitly mentioned.
Area is supposed to be covered in the pre-high school standards; however, experience shows that students entering the high school geometry classroom have forgotten the majority of formulas they've learned and, though they relearn the formulas reasonably quickly, they appear to have never or rarely applied these formulas to compound shapes. Only one or two had ever applied a decomposition argument to justify the area of a triangle, much less a parallelogram or trapezoid (which are 6th-8th grade standards)!
I have a few related questions that should be taken in this context, in addition with the knowledge that learning from the middle grades is often forgotten:
Presuming a student has actually experienced their math education in a CC-aligned manner, what role should the idea of area play in his or her geometry education at the high school level?
Presuming a student's math education was hastily shoehorned into CC alignment sometime around the 6th or 7th grade, what role should the idea of area play into his or her geometry education at the high school level?
This question is in the context of common core alignment, but can also be answered in the context of college preparedness, developmental need, etc.