It's also not a binary choice between "ML" or "hand-crafted model" either. The most successful applications of ML in my own career have always been judiciously

It's also not a binary choice between "ML" or "hand-crafted model" either. The most successful applications of ML in my own career have always been judiciously building small task-specific models that fit inside a broader system. And there is also usually quite a lot of consideration being given to the model input data as well. Similarly, I have never seen a "just throw a model at it" project succeed in a finite amount of time.