These footer links have been live for a long time I remember doing an audit of a few sites from OMG as I work with competitors of their sites, and they had the site wide footers on these portals.
For sure they do have a lot of power still on such a large site and soo many thousand pages, but yeah Google has been de valuing these types of links but nerveless if you get footer links on crazy large sites it is 100% worth it.