I can't speak for 'gwern, but I was also under the impression that CNNs had basically replaced RNNs for these tasks. I think my view is colored by Jeremy Howard's FastAI talks. Since he isn't big on publishing papers (though that is changing a bit via collaborations with his students), it may be true that the state of the art is no longer best represented by published papers. (I would argue that avoiding this ambiguity is an argument in favor of publication.)