Definitely seemed like that in the 2000s when I was doing my PhD. Yann LeCun even wrote an open letter to the computer vision community around 2012 complaining

Definitely seemed like that in the 2000s when I was doing my PhD. Yann LeCun even wrote an open letter to the computer vision community around 2012 complaining about them automatically rejecting papers that used neural networks. I've been told that letter led to him launching the conference ICLR. Only a couple years later he was a keynote speaker at CVPR, the big computer vision conference.