These models certainly have found letters, although mostly they produce unreadable partial letters. Look at the images from the "What’s next?" section of the article! [1] They certainly seem better than human annotation, and more importantly don't hallucinate whole letters. Casey Handmer made a submission for this First Letters prize [2] based solely on hand-annotation and wasn't awarded it, because it's really unconvincing. His letters [3] don't look at all like the computer annotations.
