Do people who write predictive recursive descent parsers (LL(k)) really calculate first/follow sets by hand? What if the grammar requires backtracking?
However, there's also an argument here that if the grammar is too complicated to be parsed with recursive descent, it's probably just too complicated in general and should be simplified if possible. Obviously you don't always have this option when you're dealing with an external grammar, but for your own PL, you can design around that. Most Wirth's languages are good examples; Pascal is famously LL(1).
A famous example is ALGOL 60, which had the dangling else ambiguity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_else), but this was not discovered until the language had already been published. If they had been using a parser generator tool, it would have warned them that the grammar was not LL or LR.
Overall I do still prefer hand-written recursive descent parsers, but I do find this to be one of the biggest downsides of not using parser generators.