It’s actually getting more scientific. Think of it like biology. We do a big study of an ml model or an organism and confirm a property of it.

It used to be it was just maths, you could spot an error in your code and fix it. Then it was a bag of hacks and you could keep just patching your model with more and more tweaks that didn’t have a solid theoretical basis but that improved performance.

Now it’s too big and too complex and we have to do science to understand the model limitations.