In my opinion, matching the forage will increase your chance of success, but the forage for a given location, time, weather pattern, etc may be different and determining the specific forage is difficult. As an example, one day the bass could be feeding on small gills on a certain piece of cover/structure. A month later those gills have grown and now the bass are keying on larger gills. What if they're looking for crawdads, are they looking for big ones, small ones, ones missing a claw, etc? Are the crawdads molting? What color are they currently? What types of shad are in your waters, what is the size of shad in the school that the bass are currently chasing? The questions keep going and going.
Most of the time it's very difficult to determine exactly what the bass are feeding on at a given location and a specific time. Also, as Matt said the typical lure does not mimic actual forage. A crankbait isn't going to mimic a swimming fish or a crawdad, neither will a swim jig or a spinnerbait. I don't see many green pumpkin 10" worms swimming around the bottom of a pond either. Nothing in nature "matches" a senko, but that lure is almost fool proof.
Bass are opportunistic, aggresive feeders and will strike many lures that look nothing like anything actually living on planet Earth. So, I don't spend a ton of time trying to match the forage. First I try and determine where the fish are (if you can't find the fish you aren't going to catch anything). Then once you find them try and determine what type of lure is working best, crankbait, soft plastics, jigs, jerkbaits, spinnerbaits, topwater, what size lure, etc. And what retrieve is best; fast, slow, deadsticking, sweep the crank, pause it, dig it into the ground/cover, etc. And also color. When everything is dialed in perfectly you may have an epic day.
Many anglers seem to worry more about what their throwing rather than where they are throwing it. The latter is the most important.
