Honestly, it's not surprising. ML is billed as a tool, one that in the last 5 or so years we've surprisingly "figured out". This is vast overselling, but it still creates the basic mental model for folks without further training: ML is a tool you can apply to certain situations to achieve outcomes that you used to need people for, especially in vision and NLP.

I personally believe this is false, but also false in a way that we're remarkably far away from that. Even more than software, predictive automation is a process. It often relies on particular customization to your own situation to be successful. It can demand vast resources. It's wildly difficult to debug.

So we should be working to retrain those around us. ML is a process.