>Has this turned out to be less of an issue for practical applications than was initially expected? Are the models just not censored in the way that we might expect?

I think it's the case that only a handful of very loud commentators were thinking about this problem, and they were given a much broader platform to discuss it than was reasonable. A problem baked into the discussion around AI, safety, censorship, and alignment, is that it's dominated by a fairly small number of close friends who all loudly share the same approximate set of opinions.