Didn't all recommendations engines move to two-towers like models? I remember that it "solved" the freshness problem (ie when adding a new item to your catalog how do you recommend it to users if there are no ratings/interactions). Of course as long as you have a good model that creates items embeddings.

Regarding time series, don't everyone moved to attention based models?

Not challenging your answer, just curious. I work mostly with Graph NNs and quite a bit out of touch with the rest of the field.