BERT, GPT-2 and now GPT-3 have brought us to the tail end of such a hype cycle, with the most enthusiastic DNN enthusiasts still claiming that it's understanding meaning and general AI isn't far off, whereas the folks who give out ACL Best Paper awards (all long-time experts in their field) probably sigh and are thankful for a paper that breaks with the hype and tells the overenthusiasts that there's still stuff left to understand and discover.
Do we need mediocre philosophical papers when we can have mediocre technical papers (or even fairly decent technical papers) instead? Hell no. But do we occasionally need a good and thoughtful philosophical paper to sober ourselves up? Admittedly yes.
I went to NACL about 5 years ago, and was amazed that most papers even then were deep learning related.
BTW, it is a small nuisance to not have article links on this web page. I had to copy titles/authors, do a web search, find and download. That said, between just skimming vs. careful reading, I probably spend an average of 20 minutes on a downloaded article so the overhead of finding and downloading is realy nothing.