True bigs are harder to find and give minutes to now than they were in the past, but there are still out there and the good ones are more skilled and athletic than they were in the past and therefore are huge assets to any team. Interior-only bruising bigs are still playing huge important on really good teams. See Karnowski, Salt, Egbunu, Bam, Landen Lucas, Meeks, Haas, Landale, Ristic, DJ Johnson, John Collins.
All of those guys with the exception of Collins don't venture outside the paint all that often and definitely aren't beating opponents down the floor. That doesn't stop their teams from pushing the pace when they want to. Getting even a poor version of a guy like that is what we so desperately need because we were dominated by other team's bigs in most of our losses