I think it would be pretty reliable in controlled circumstances. If I take a picture of a book with my cell phone- google Gemini pro is much better at recognizing the text than Samsung's built in OCR.
I would think the same, the cause for hesitation is that we only think this, but cannot know it without thorough testing. Right now the scope of problems where things behave reliably and as expected and scope of problems where things get whacky are unknown. The borders are known to some rather fuzzy extent at best, by people who work with these things as a full-time job. This means we are just blindly gambling on it. For important things, archiving, etc. where truth matters, I will continue using traditional OCR until we can define the reliable use-case scope of LLM based OCR better. I am extremely enthusiastic about LLM's and the things these offer, but i am also a realist. LLM's are an infant technology, and no-where near the level of maturity that companies like openAI claim.