Maybe not "looked down on", but more of "looked at as a promising avenue". I mean, 2-3 years ago, it felt LLMs are going to be nice storytellers at best. These days, we're wondering just how much of the overall process of "understanding" and "reasoning" can be reduced to adjacency search in sufficiently absurdly high-dimensional vector space.

People certainly knew that language modeling was a key unsupervised objective to unlock inference on language.

I agree that I think they underestimated quite how useful a product could be built around just the language modeling objective, but it's still been critical for most NLP advances of the last ~6+ years.