Yeah. I was kind of infatuated with the UMAP paper when it first came up (and working through it to build intuition led me to persistent homology and other fun

Yeah. I was kind of infatuated with the UMAP paper when it first came up (and working through it to build intuition led me to persistent homology and other fun stuff), but it's far too complex to work as a "plug-in tool" that people naive to statistics can blindly use. This is the power of ANOVA, CCA, linear regression and factor analysis, etc. It's much, much, much, much harder to shoot yourself in the foot, particularly with experimental data (usage in the social sciences is another bag of johnsons.)