Yes, because it was clear from the beginning that it would be just a pattern matching exercise. No reasoning necessary, no actual, deep understanding of the written text.

It was always known that pattern matching would be what ML algorithms would be great at - since the 60s or do. Reasoning about and "understanding" things - well, not so much. Some people hoped that this behavior would at some point just "emerge". But they basically resorted to this because they did not see any promising path to these goals.

Where is the high accuracy OCR? All the OCR software I've seen so far is less accurate than me, especially with handwriting, damaged material, odd viewing angles, etc.