Some of the approaches are, some aren't. SIFT itself builds upon knowledge that is much older than it. Either way it doesn't matter. The OP was arguing that

Some of the approaches are, some aren't. SIFT itself builds upon knowledge that is much older than it. Either way it doesn't matter. The OP was arguing that the many years of man effort put into SIFT was a complete waste. I am saying that this is very shortsighted, as non-machine learning vision techniques have heavily influenced how we approach and think about vision problems even when using ML.