Even though the RFC was written in 1998, it took a while for it to catch on. For years, my DNS servers were using both methods.
Both methods make use of the .in-addr.arpa "domain" syntax.
> Before this was popular, you could get your ISP to defer to your DNS for reverse records directly
I'm not actually seeing the difference between these two... besides this new "reverse delegation" allowing different nameservers for prefixes longer than /24... aren't you still relying on your ISP/upstream provider (if you don't own your own IPs) to delegate reverse lookups to your own DNS server either way?
Running a long time ISP, I found extremely few customers wanting to do something like RFC2317, or could actually figure out and do it effectively. Almost all were content with control panel/API and having the ISP do it after I pointed them to this informational RFC asking them if this is what they wanted.