Which financial model actually works in the real world? A lot of what is studied seems to be nonsense from more than 60 years ago, because computers and algorithmic thinking started to come into vogue in economics research.

The same can be stated about Markowitz portfolio optimization, a product of hype in the operations research space at the time. It obviously doesn't work because portfolio optimization isn't a simple convex optimization problem in the real world. Yet anyone who studies finance is forced to learn it and other empirically failed bullshit.