Has anyone recently gone from ER to a single manager HF?

It depends many things.

• Most on this platform want to go as elite as possible (and ironically those who make it to the very elite aren't on WSO). If you are dead set on elite SM HF (we need an acronym for this, "E-SM-HF?"), you need to do IB to maximize your chance of getting elite PE and then get looks. Slim chances but you are allowed the hope (just like how they created Hunger Games)
• If you just want to get to the buy-side, working for a solid analyst (not necessarily measured by BB or not) can be as good as working at BB IB. 
• Are you even dead set on public investing? If you aren't, going IB preserves your optionality to PE, corp dev, strategy, all of which are harder / impossible to get into via sell-side ER. 
• Another immutable truth: there are always going to be more absolute numbers of buy-siders who came from banking than from equity research because every year hundreds of people go into banking and way less go into equity research. 

Hope this helps.