OCR was discussed here lately several times (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952605 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42871143), and some cool projects like https://github.com/Future-House/paper-qa?tab=readme-ov-file#... are using PyMuPDF. My experience with Tesseract is pretty sad, it's usually not good enough and modern LLMs are better.
In my tests I found tesseract quite good for regular text documents. For other kinds of texts it's not great.
As for using models - there are some good small language models as well, and of course LLMs.
I sorta feel though that if one needs complex OCR, or a vision model for layout, one should opt for either a commercial solution that abstracts the deployment and GPU management, or bake ones own system.
For most use cases involving text documents though, my subjective opinion is that tesseract is sufficient.