I think it depends on your context. From theoretical point of view you can treat both (feature engineering and ML) as transformation defined by some function wi

I think it depends on your context. From theoretical point of view you can treat both (feature engineering and ML) as transformation defined by some function with parameters. From practical point of view, they can differ a lot. Imagine, you would like to handle in a different way: feature transformation that can be done on 1M rows and 2 columns in 5 seconds, and training of ML model that can take 7 days to train.