It seems the problem with $HOST_ADDRESSES_4 is only present in the RAW-edition. I just tested it with the Free-edition (which is basically the enterprise one with the CMC) and the check works out of the box there. So the CMC apparently knows how to resolve that macro, the Nagios-core doesn’t.
And - the other way around - with the fix described above it apparently breaks the check in the Enterprise edition.
I was also a bit surprised as to how this problem hasn’t been discussed more often, but the documentation for the best practices was obviously written with the Enterprise-edition in mind.
The broken graphs however are present in the RAW- and Enterprise-edition.