For sure; by the late 2000s I was still seeing it, but it was fairly uncommon by then. When I said "considered a bad practice since the mid 1980s" I was specifically meaning since Grampp & Morris 1984[1]. It definitely continued to be common for decades after that. I remember lots docs that told you to run "configure" where now they'd tell you to run "./configure", but the docs tended to lag behind the actual change to the default PATH.

[1]: https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/gjin2/Classes/246/Spring2019/Se...