I was just using tesseract.js and the repo looks active. Tesseract is still crap, but it's the free crap, so I'll just put up with it. Grayscale seems to improve the OCR. I'm sure there are tons of other techniques to improve the result
I can't find anything backing this up at the moment but I was under the impression that Google had been upstreaming some development to the project. Open Sans recognition in particular got noticeably more reliable sometime in the last few years.