Your focus on "effort" and "real" sounds a bit exclusive at the behest of your own job security.

The ML boom (specifically DL) is so interesting because of the applications. Computers recognising images better than humans for instance.

Surely outside of academia its a means to an end like anything else. If Team A wires together some high level Keras components with 30 lines of code, and does something really cool with it, is it less valuable?