They still talk about Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) in quite a bit of detail in the sequence labelling chapter, but you are quite right, Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and especially neural network based CRFs are in the top rankings when it comes to named entity recognition (NER) and part-of-speech tagging (POS), e.g. see https://github.com/jiesutd/NCRFpp.