My sense is after the LACC renovation was so well received a lot of courses are bringing back barancas and more native looking areas and hazards that were originally designed and lost (e.g. Wilshire, Brentwood, Bel Air). Courses feel a lot more like being out in nature in Southern California than before.
Restoring the barrancas was the hardest part of our work at Bel Air. We spent a lot of time looking at what others had done to try and find a good balance between losing balls in the hazard and maintaining it to the point that it was meaningless.
Part of the solution was not to treat every piece of barranca the same, but in general, I think Eric Iverson and superintendent Justin DePippo came up with a great balance of making even the "unmaintained" areas rough and ready, without swallowing all the golf balls.
Adding: I should note, that in George Thomas's day, the barrancas were not such a problem, because there was no development around these courses to increase the drainage flow through the channel of his natural hazards. Today, you can't keep that original look naturally, because there is way way more runoff during a storm [or even from just irrigating the golf course and neighbors' yards]. You can try to do it with a big pipe underneath and a re-creation of the original look above the pipe, but only if you have enough fall / depth to make that work.