I am not sure why this idea has lost popularity after the 60’s. Papers appear about this, but more people seemed to be interested in it half a century ago. I would say, the idea started independently. On one hand we had a group of noncommutative algebraist and homological algebraist working on ideas that was probably once inspired from the category of fields. For instance separable algebras (separable fields) and von Neumann regular rings with its semiheriditary and quasi-inverse property (not far related to fields and product of fields) were, in my opinion, quit popular among noncommutative algebraist and homological algebraist. Then there were a group of people who purposely wanted to see ideas developed for Galois theory extended to rings. We have now definitions for separable ring extensions, splitting ring extensions and even algebraic extensions of rings (which is not the usual algebraic extension we would intuitively define). The last topic (algebraic extension) was studied by Borho, Enochs, Hochster and Raphael.
Having said that, I decided to add myself into the set of cooks (to make a better broth). Recently I proved the following for instance:
Proposition Let $A$ be a Baer ring and $B$ be its total integral closure (this is also called algebraic closure by Robert Raphael) and suppose $f\in A[x]$ is a non-zero monic polynomial over $A$. Consider the set of zeros $S$ of $f$ in $B$. Then $A[S]$ is a finitely generated module over $A$.
The proof is a bit technical and to share it I am going to give a lecture about it and write an article about this (to be continued…).
Edit: I have a lot of new results here but I decided not to write a second post about this yet. I think a pdf file is better for this kind of thing. My paper related to this topic and proofs can be found here.