Are there still sensors for a pen-type barcode scanner?
Since you can still buy these, yes, probably there are such chips available.
My best guess is that if you're in a pinch, you could make something like that yourself.
Since 1980's, LEDs have come a far way, and so have even the cheapest microcontrollers.
I'd personally just slap multiple cheap 0402 LEDs next to each other, say, two of them, and a photodiode in the middle:
      photo
LED 1 diode LED 3 
+---+ +---+ +---+ 
|   | |   | |   | 
:---: :---: :---: 
:   : :   : :   : 
:   : :   : :   : 
:---: :---: :---: 
|   | |   | |   | 
+---+ +---+ +---+ 

|&lt;--  &lt;2.0mm --&gt;|

(top view)
Having two LEDs increases your sensitivity in forward direction even without lenses, but industrially, if you build a pen-style barcode scanner, you'd probably want your front lens to be part of of your enclosure design anyway, so you'd get a polyacrylat or similar plastic piece made to order.
Then, you'd have to realize that spatial resolution doesn't matter all that much – you can compensate for a lack of &quot;tightness&quot; of observed spot by doing better filtering of present and past measurements; after all, you know quite well what the relevant frequencies in your &quot;dark/bright&quot; patterns are, and with a modern microcontroller having an ADC with more than one bit, you get quite a nice sensitivity.
You can test that hypothesis yourself: Get a photo of your barcode of interest. Open it in e.g. GIMP, convert to grayscale, and apply a gaussian blur with a pixel radius (=variance) that corresponds to the radius of the core of the illuminated spot. Crop down your image to a single pixel height, full width of the barcode (and then some, if possible) and export it in a format that you can read with your favourite scripting language (Python, octave/matlab, ...). Apply a band-pass filter that reflects the expected frequency range (in 1/pixel) of your barcode (typically, 1/narrow bar to 1/wide bar, but depends on type of barcode). Play around with thresholds until you can see the edges of your bars again :)
I'd expect actual barcode sensors to feed the high-passed brightness signal into more or less a biased digital PLL running to allow to adapt to a human not being perfectly reproducible and uniform in speed.
Or, and of course: Get an optical mouse sensor. They do exactly what you want, namely detect how quick someone is moving across a surface, whilst some still offer an output for brightness. There were some datasheets for older optical mouse sensors that even described how to get something like &quot;camera&quot; screenshots (the sensor is really just a 9-pixel camera, often) out of it. Do that regularly, and you'll have something that is hard to beat in terms of accuracy.