That's such a broad brushstroke.
Consider, for example, Echo Nest's research in machine listening in Barry Vercoe's Music, Mind and Machine group. This all made it into Spotify when they acquired Echo Nest. His work led and pushed other researchers in the field at ISMIR, etc. Hard to downplay the impact of Spotify on our culture. This is not "hokum."
And as I shoulder-surfed the whole thing, I can tell you it started out as a crazy dream. When Brian Whitman and Barry began it, CPU power was meager, GPUs were scarcely recognized as general computation aids. It was mostly about music similarity instead of social features. (I like to think I helped Brian think that way, egoist I am). Even storing 1,000,000 songs was once difficult. This was in the AJAX and perl days.
But like Brian's daydream, many other projects there are daydreams. That's the point of the ML, to try the daydreams other people won't. Not to disrespect others for taking on research more likely to result in tangible results. In fact, that's very sane! So if you want to critique the place according to some personally-applied standards, that's great, that's your opinion, next.