> It seems to me LL and LR parser generators are overrated, and hand-written recursive descent is best in practice

I would now agree with that. My compiler experience was on a team that happened to have a LALR expert, Jeanne Musinski PhD, a student of Jeffrey Ullman. She invented a better error recovery for the language. Recursive descent would have been perfectly suited to the task.

> LR being more expressive than LL has never mattered.

Quite agree. One might guess that a language that needs that might be hard to program in.

Parser generators are great in Python (Lark for me) so you can iterate fast and get a runtime spec of your grammar.

A hand-written recursive descent parser is something you do later when you start to industrialize your code, to get better error messages, make the parser incremental, etc.

Bison/ANTLR are code generators, they do not fit well in that model.