Inductors were great for smoothing in tube circuits, because tube circuits were generally designed so everything was Class A, so the average power and therefore current draw was pretty much the same all the time.
That is because an inductor tends to keep current the same.
But in a digital circuit, that is a bad idea! CMOS draws relatively high current spikes whenever a state is switched, which is one of the reasons why they tend to be very noisy and require a lot of bypass capacitors. In fact, a lot of attention is given to reducing inductance.