The last place I worked had manual QA teams, which covered parts of the testing that weren't easily automated. In particular, they had workflows to go through for each expected function in the UI.

I don't know how common that is anymore; as you've noted, a lot of companies de-emphasize the need for a dedicated QA team.

Hi! I work in manual QA at a financial institution. We have dedicated QA teams, and some of us also work towards automation. A lot of companies, where I work included, are often stuck in legacy systems that modern automation tools simply can't work with, and as a result require manual QA (or at least a dedicated team for automating).

I doubt you'll find anything at larger silicon valley-esque startups, but any company that creates tools for non-technical end users (either internal or external) typically needs QA.