There are two general approaches to making chicken juicy in the oven. The first is to cook a short time at a high temperature. For example, Barbara Kafka's recipe for roast chicken
calls for cooking the chicken at 500 degrees F for less than an hour.
The second option is to cook at a low temperature for a very long time. This recipe calls for cooking for an hour at 250 degrees F, with a high heat sear at the beginning and end of the time. Even more extreme is this recipe, which cooks at 140 degrees F for 4-6 hours. However, low heat will not give the yummy crisp skin.
Neither of these requires flipping the chicken.
However, if you really want the crispiness of the skin, flipping is the way to go. Two recipes from Cooks Illustrated (one and two) both call for high heat and a couple of flips. (As does Barbara Kafka's recipe for cut-up chicken, which I make all the time. Season the chicken, and put in a 500 degree F oven for 10 minutes, flip, 10 more minutes, flip, and 10 or more minutes or until the skin is crispy.)
If you want to go with the classics, Julia Child's recipe for roast chicken from also calls for turning the chicken onto different sides. She also bastes frequently, although the above recipes don't call for it.
Back meat on poultry tends to be rubbery, inaccessible, and there is relatively little of it. The meat is almost like other dark meat but is found only in thin sheets. Also since during traditional roasting the back meat is down in the pan it tends to be less cooked than is pleasant for dark meat.
It isn't practical to try and carve it because it is a ton of effort for just a little bit of not-very-good meat.
After carving off the major cuts I will use my hands to pull off any useful scraps- including some of the larger pieces of back meat. I save these pieces for my standard poultry scraps applications: pie, soup, and enchiladas.
Whatever is left gives up it's goodness into the broth when the carcass is boiled and is then fed, with the spent carcass, back to the chickens.
Best Answer
One is pointless, and the other is very specific.
Keller's approach - bringing the chicken out of the fridge 45 minutes before - is pointless, because there's no way in hell any significant proportion of a chicken is going to get from fridge-cold to room temperature in 45 minutes, or any other time that still allows it to be safe to eat. Point 1 in this article from the Food Lab is about steak, but that only reinforces my point. If a steak barely warms up after 1.5 hours, a chicken will do no better.
The Lucky Peach approach seems to be using the fridge mainly to dry out the skin in order to give a crispy result for that particular 'lacquered' recipe. That approach may well work for a chicken without all the lacquer as well.
Personally, I go more or less straight from the fridge and use a digital probe thermometer to ensure I don't overcook the bird, and have generally very satisfactory results.