I finished my Master's a couple years ago, and in our IC probing lab, it was almost all GPIB. All of the pieces of test equipment, except for a single cutting-edge Keysight scope (which used Ethernet instead), were connected together via those chunky but satisfying and robust cables, usually controlled via MATLAB or some other IC measurement software package.
Yes, those cables are often called "garden hose cables". The only benefit of that bus infrastructure under a nowadays view is that it gives the ability to synchronously trigger multple instruments which is very rarely used or required.
