Ask HN: Are trackbacks and pingbacks dead?

At the heyday of blogging* , trackbacks and pingbacks were lauded as the great distributor of conversation and community: to comment on someone else's blog article in depth, you could simply link it in your own article, and through the power of track-/ping-backs, a link back to your article would automatically appear in the comment section of the original.

Is there a place for such functionality in a world of walled communication gardens (e.g. social networks, Obvious Corp products, online newspapers/magazines) and Jekyll-based static content publishing (which either disregard discussion or rely on Disqus)? Or is the devil in the details (e.g. spam problems doing more harm than good in some insurmountable way)?

(* I define this heyday as the time when Wordpress or Blogger were most popular among "average Internet users" just looking to have a presence online beyond a MySpace profile, about 6-7 years ago.)