AFAIK they still use it, and it plays a huge role (based on my fairly limited experience). A couple months back I did a little consulting on the side with a small ecommerce store that had recently struggled to get any traffic despite all their SEO analytics showing green except for page speed. They ranked poorly for just about every keyword that they had previous been doing well on.

Bit of CDN/Caching, upped them to a better hosting plan and they're back on track again - rankings are back to normal and page speed is way up.

A separate signal is user leaving SERP, going back to it and checking another site - somewhat clear sign of failure of a site to deliver. And users leave if your page loads slowly.