The Taj was still in business. I can imagine it’s worse now.

Towns whose economies rely on gambling are often dreary places imho. There’s nothing uplifting about a bunch of addicts on Wally-like scooters cashing their welfare checks and repeatedly sliding tokens into slot machines like they’re in a trance. The cavernous Taj had hundreds of machines in what must have been a football-field-sized set of rooms.

Gambling addicts and Trumpers may be the real-world examples closest to the scene in the Matrix where Neo gets to see the pods to which other humans are connected.