Yes, I think Gaussian Splats are were all the rage is.

My limited understanding is that Nerfs are compute-heavy because each cloud point is essentially a small neural network that can compute its value from a specific camera angle. Gaussian splats are interesting since they achieve almost the same effect using a much simpler mechanism of using gaussian values at each cloud points and can be efficiently computed in real-time on GPU.

While a Nerf could be used to render a novel view of a scene, it could not do so in real-time, while gaussian splats can which opens up lots of use-cases.