SQLite isn't some kind of universal template, I'm not saying people should copy it or that recursive descent is a bag choice. But empirically parser generators are used in real production systems. SQLite is unusual in that they also wrote the parser generator, but otherwise is in good company. Postgres uses Bison, for example.
Additionally, I think that Lemon was started as a personal learning project in grad school (as academic a project as it gets) and evolved into a component of what is probably the most widely deployed software system of all time shows this distinction between what is academic and what is practical isn't all that meaningful to begin with. What's academic becomes practical when the circumstances are right. Better to evaluate a technique in the context of your problem than to prematurely bin things into artificial categories.