MNIST is not your typical real world tabular data. Many if not most data science problems out there are still in the range of a few k samples from my perspectiv

MNIST is not your typical real world tabular data. Many if not most data science problems out there are still in the range of a few k samples from my perspective (trying to "sell" ML to the average company) From a statistical point of view I would not call the datasets small (you can decently compare two means from subsets without needing a student's distribution).