I don't think you realize how bad NLP was prior to transformers. Oldschool entity recognition was extremely brittle to the point that it basically didn't work.

CV too for that matter, object recognition before deep learning required a white background and consistent angles. Remember this XKCD from only 2014? https://xkcd.com/1425/

CV is a space where I would 100% agree with you. But - edge cases notwithstanding - there's not so much of a dropoff with NER that I would first go to an LLM.