You can't generalize from your personal experience to the rest of academia. There is far too much variation between fields, institutions, and countries as well

You can't generalize from your personal experience to the rest of academia. There is far too much variation between fields, institutions, and countries as well as over time. ML in particular is an extreme outlier due to amount of money and business interests involved. Your experience would already have been quite different in a less fashionable subfield of CS.