I have a feeling that your typical smart software engineer (probably works on large-scale infra) became increasingly jaded re: ML, while the field continues to deliver astonishing achievements regardless.
Maybe its the usual ressantiment towards "a hyped field", which only strengthened after the advances continued and the prophecied neo-AI winter failed to happen. Maybe its compensation envy. Maybe math envy. Maybe disdain for softer " faulty" error-prone computing paradigms in general.
Anyway, as a non-ML software engineer I find the field genuinely interesting from mathematical, engineering and philosophical POV. Recent advances such as CLIP became very practical even for small-scale personal use.
If you are interested in large multimodal models, feel free to chat.
Though generally artists and programmers tend to keep a few good tricks just for themselves.