What do you mean by hand engineered? Is a part-of-speech tagger trained on a manually annotated corpus hand engineered? If not, then which "stacks" are hand-engineered and still popular today?
Yes this is true. Perhaps I should better express it as a hand engineered feature pipeline, ie the way people these days will POS tag, then lemmatize, then do something with WordNet, then maybe some Semantic Frame thing and finally have an application they can benchmark. Writing that pipeline is manual, and it has hand engineered features in it too, though some may be trained.