For some reason that quote and your point made more salient to me a trend with AI research, which is that it seems to increasingly become difficult to understan

For some reason that quote and your point made more salient to me a trend with AI research, which is that it seems to increasingly become difficult to understand and predict. That is, for awhile it seemed like tinkering in computer science without strong grounding in mathematical or statistical theory, and then there started to be a lot of discussion about "black box" processes, explainability, and interpretability and not fully understanding what's been done, and now the discussion is about not being able to predict the features of the models. I'm having trouble putting into words what I'm thinking but this whole field increasingly seems to have moved from something very theory derived into something very empirical very quickly. I wonder at what point gains will start to decrease only because people won't know where to go with things anymore.