It doesn't have to be Tesseract specifically, there are other OCR libraries that work better and are licensed by several products(I think Abby licenses theirs).

It doesn't have to be Tesseract specifically, there are other OCR libraries that work better and are licensed by several products(I think Abby licenses theirs). But that wasn't my main point. Similar to Tesla popularizing ML-driven self parking, which doesn't work any better than the PID/Kalman filter methods already in use by others for the past 10+ years, my point was that today we're seemingly shoehorning ML into solving problems that have already been solved by "boring" traditional engineering solutions for over 10 years now, just to feed the AI product hype, similar to the digital camera megapixel race, or other such nonsense that offered no measurable upgrade in quality but looked good on product stickers to move merchandise at higher prices.