All older black hat tactics (like hidden text) have to be modernized to work in the current era, but then all the older white hat methods have to be updated to work today too. All black hat methods can be customized for today with enough fiddling, or frequently combined with scheduled short term cycling. So blandly saying "it's risky" because it's an old concept is itself an outdated comment.
As with keyword stuffing, frontloading the text in the (for example, image) file name, description etc can work, as the search engine will not search there for exploits, but the presence of the text will nonetheless be read to impact ranking. As indicated above, combining the text with "hiding content for user experience" will get past the robot.
