Well, I do think there are some very real shortcomings that current general purpose compilers have when applied to machine learning (aggrevated by the fact that

Well, I do think there are some very real shortcomings that current general purpose compilers have when applied to machine learning (aggrevated by the fact that lots of machine learning code is written in languages with poor compiler support), so lots people looked at that, wrote small optimizers and got good performance. But then it turned out that researchers wanted to do more and more things in their ML models and these small optimizers are turning into full-blown compilers, with not a lot of thought about whether that is truly the correct thing to do.