Split-prism focusing depends on your using fairly fast lenses. When the normal "kit" lens was a 50/1.8 (or 50/1.7, or something similar) that worked well. With slower lenses, one side or the other (or both) will be "blacked out" nearly all the time, and it provides no help in focusing. A typical kit lens nowadays is a zoom with a maximum aperture of something like f/4.5 of f5.6, which is too slow for a typical split-prism to work well at all.

You can design a split prism to work with slower lenses, but the slower of lens you design it for, the less precise it becomes (the less offset you see between the two sides as the image goes out of focus). I've never tried one that was designed for something like f/5.6 so I can't say for sure, but at a guess the offset would be small enough that it wouldn't be very helpful.

Microprisms lose effectiveness with slow lenses in much the same way (when you get down to it, they're basically a large number of much smaller split prisms).

There is a third possibility. Most current focusing screens don't diffuse the light very much as it passes through the screen. The less it diffuses the light, the less apparent blurring is as the picture goes out of focus. If you use a screen that diffuses the light more, it'll give a better indication of how well the picture is focused.

This has a shortcoming too though: diffusing the light more also makes the "picture" in the viewfinder dimmer. Much as with the others, you're stuck with tailoring the focusing screen to the lenses you're going to use. Professional level cameras that they expect to be used (at least primarily) with fast lenses will also typically have focusing screens available that diffuse the light more, and therefore give a better indication of focusing. The trade-off of that is that the view they give is dimmer, so you nearly need to use them with relatively fast lenses.