Symbolic AI gets used quite a lot, we just don't call it AI. Even expert systems, often seen as a late-1980s dead end, are based on the same sort of technology one would use for efficiently querying any database.
If the computer solves problems and we know what it's doing, that's software engineering
If the computer solves problems and we don't know what it's doing, that's AI
If the computer doesn't solve problems and we don't know what it's doing, that's Friday afternoon
