I think it's a true scotsman fallacy. We don't have a good definition for ML. So we reject methods and problems as not "real" ML". Ive done some logistic regres

I think it's a true scotsman fallacy. We don't have a good definition for ML. So we reject methods and problems as not "real" ML". Ive done some logistic regression in my work and hesistated to call it ML. But Ive read a survey about tools used by people who do ML and logistic regression was the top item on that list. Neurons are just an inspiration from biology. You can call them layers of neurons or you can call them matrices and do matrix multiplication. Nothing special about neurons. I understand your argument that people like to use buzzwords and you don't like this. But it's a genral problem which applies to everything, not just ML.