As far as I can tell every single penny of the hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars that have been spent on ML recommendation engines has been wasted and

As far as I can tell every single penny of the hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars that have been spent on ML recommendation engines has been wasted and the team of highly-compensated developers who spent years burning through cash building Hadoop clusters, buying GPUs, building dashboards and churning out thousands of tables and charts for execs to ponder over just to build something that recommends I rebuy something I already bought could have been replaced with a 24-year old communications major who also understands the products being sold and the people buying them.