[eckzow]

The first footnote of the article says:

> While that could mean just about anything, nearly everyone who writes a half-decent hand-written parser, whether they know it or not, is writing a recursive descent parser [1].

> [1] Parsing Expression Grammars (PEG)s and “parser combinators” in some functional languages are just recursive descent parsers in disguise.

Which, while I haven't thought about it deeply, intuitively makes some sense: parser combinators encourage an approach mostly equivalent to little functions that do something like "parse a $thing, or parse a $different_thing" (etc.) which very much translates down like a recursive descent parser.