Well, the tech du jour now is whatever's easier for the AI to model. Of course it's a chicken and egg problem, the less popular a tech is the harder it is to make it into the training data set. On the other hand, from an information theoretic point of view, tools that are explicit and provides better error messages and require less assumptions about hidden state is definitely easier for the AI when it tries to generalize to unknowns that doesn't exist in its training data.