This doesn’t seem like good advice. As a human, the data might not be engineerable by you. The data might seem like it is, but you may end up losing information

This doesn’t seem like good advice. As a human, the data might not be engineerable by you. The data might seem like it is, but you may end up losing information through your feature engineering. The combinatorial power of NNs is so great that it’s almost always better to give the model as much data as possible and let it figure out which parts of the data are important.