They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago.
https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/
https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin...