This is from 2017, so probably obsolete by now.
Certainly recurrent networks in general are not obsolete, even if attention/convolution works better for some applications.
Perhaps one ought to try GRU before LSTM but there’s no reason to suppose that it would dominate in all cases.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01603
This is also obvious: Without recurrence you cannot remember information that is not externally visible, but it may be computationally very convenient and often necessary to maintain information that is hidden.
The hard part is learning reps for hidden information as recurrences are plagued by vanishing and shattering gradients.