I agree with criticism of Noam Chomsky as a linguist. I was raised in the typological tradition which has its very own kind of beef with Chomsky due to other reasons (his singular focus on English for constructing his theories amongst other things), but his dislike of statistical methods was of course equally suspect.
Nevertheless there is something to be said for classical linguistic theory in terms of constituent (or dependency) grammars and various other tools. They give us much simpler models that, while incomplete, can still be fairly useful at a fraction of the cost and size of transformer architectures (e.g. 99% of morphology can be modeled with finite state machines). They also let us understand languages better - we can't really peek into a transformer to understand structural patterns in a language or to compare them across different languages.
That is simply false about UG only being based on English. Maybe in 1950 but any modern generativist theory uses data from many, many languages and English has been re-analysed in light of other languages (see here for an example of quantifiers being analysed in English on the basis of data in a Salish language https://philpapers.org/rec/MATQAT )
Nevertheless there is something to be said for classical linguistic theory in terms of constituent (or dependency) grammars and various other tools. They give us much simpler models that, while incomplete, can still be fairly useful at a fraction of the cost and size of transformer architectures (e.g. 99% of morphology can be modeled with finite state machines). They also let us understand languages better - we can't really peek into a transformer to understand structural patterns in a language or to compare them across different languages.