I don't think that's a universal statement that aplies to every kind of documents and languages. Mistral OCR is able to do things no "traditional" OCR was ever able to.

If you consider non-English script, traditional OCR is not more reliable.

CJK have lots of character and high confusion rate.

Arabic scripts are complex and have lots of morphs.

Vietnamese have easily confused diacritics.

Thai have lots of non-standard fonts.

I wish it were. Alas...