I guess a few people are still talking about it because it sounds significant, the name sounds as if it's competing with OOP, instead of being the gimmick that it is.
We do the same thing in OOP (without the "spooky action from distance" you've noticed) with the Decorator & Strategy patterns, very simple patterns, even those who don't know about patterns are probably using them without knowing.
There are people, who prefer pure C, without OOP's "spooky action from distance". Just like language support for OOP concepts, AOP gives you a higher level of abstraction to solve complex problems.
We do the same thing in OOP (without the "spooky action from distance" you've noticed) with the Decorator & Strategy patterns, very simple patterns, even those who don't know about patterns are probably using them without knowing.