It is the past although you can get any SEO benefits if you have backlinks on quality directories.
My advice is, don't focus on web directories if you don't want waste of your time and money, or submit your sites to too many web directories can harm SEO for your website.
Like @Hugo E. said, Web directories are probably not the best way in 2017 to get SEO benefits from backlinks, especially when Google work so hard to analyze all the links and to detect no relevant backlinks.