Agree with you. But none of this is useful for practical (applied) machine learning. I don't want to disappoint you but you can read it as machine learning porn, but otherwise don't waste time on it.
I’ve used this stuff, and more often, the ideas taught, to break down a problem into a tackle-able set of pieces more times than I can count.
Never underestimate the fundamentals. Too many of my colleagues use models without actually understanding any of it. I’ve debugged so many problems by looking at the technical details in original papers and textbooks.
I'm going to have to rethink everything now as since it worked and was quite quick (I didn't even sample using MCMC, just brute force pulled permutations) so it was clearly not a bayesian approach, and I am very very far from one of the top 20 (or 200, or 2000 or 20000, maybe 200000?) researchers...
To choose just one example, the analysis of the new UK COVID variant relies on Bayesian modelling, both for the government analysis and the Imperial paper. (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...)
[1] - https://turing.ml/dev/ [2] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.02702