Yep, it's certainly true that these techniques never went away fully, but they've been eclipsed by the simpler techniques. Academic work, especially under the guise of "computational linguistics" as opposed to "NLP", works a lot on this. But the public face of NLP has been pure new-school stuff for a while now.

I was more trying to just talk about why the richly structured old school fell from grace, not claim that it's dead and buried.