I'd argue that the Hexagon DSPs shipped with all Qualcomm's phone SoC which a large number of us have in our pockets right now are probably more prominent examp

I'd argue that the Hexagon DSPs shipped with all Qualcomm's phone SoC which a large number of us have in our pockets right now are probably more prominent example. Itanium's problem wasn't so much divergent control flow as not being able to handle unpredictable latencies on load instructions without halting all execution entirely. There were some features that were, in theory, supposed to deal with this but using them was where the magic compiler problem came in. For DSPs you can usually predict memory latency so this isn't an issue and VLIW works great there even with some amount of branching.