You seem to find the explanation unsatisfying and are getting mad at the tools. The program that defines how you recognize a bird is defined in the connectivity

You seem to find the explanation unsatisfying and are getting mad at the tools. The program that defines how you recognize a bird is defined in the connectivity of the neurons in your eye and your brain. The circuit is the program. It's not at all clear that there is or even should be a deeper explanation than "a function with sufficiently many parameters can approximate any other function with only a small change to those parameters, and thus allows tractable solving" - whether by gradient descent or some hokey approximation our neurons are probably doing. We have even less of an idea how our own system of "understanding" works than we do of neural networks "understanding". If you're going to be mad at tools that don't provide satisfying explanations for how they work, then look no further than your own brain. Are you going to give up on thinking, just because when you look at it closely you realize you have no idea how on earth you're even doing it?