Ansible how to ignore unreachable hosts before ansible 2.7.x

I found a good solution here. You ping each host locally to see if you can connect and then run commands against the hosts that passed:

---
- hosts: all
  connection: local
  gather_facts: no
  tasks:
    - block:
        - name: determine hosts that are up
          wait_for_connection:
            timeout: 5
          vars:
            ansible_connection: ssh
        - name: add devices with connectivity to the "running_hosts" group
          group_by:
            key: "running_hosts"
      rescue:
        - debug: msg="cannot connect to {{inventory_hostname}}"

- hosts: running_hosts
  gather_facts: no
  tasks:
  - command: date

With current version on Ansible (2.8) something like this is possible:

- name: identify reachable hosts
  hosts: all
  gather_facts: false
  ignore_errors: true
  ignore_unreachable: true
  tasks:
    - block:
        - name: this does nothing
          shell: exit 1
          register: result
      always:
        - add_host:
            name: "{{ inventory_hostname }}"
            group: reachable

- name: Converge
  hosts: reachable
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - debug: msg="{{ inventory_hostname }} is reachable"