Academic silo with little to no real transfer to business. ML eventually enabled building better continuous and discrete models for inference, control, and prediction.
At least my recollection of fuzzy logic are from around the late eighties / early nineties and always involved the example of a thermostat that can only turn fully on or fully off. :)
I don't think that would work for clothes washers though, because there isn't the same kind of pumping water for recirculation. Somewhat related, my washing machine (upright, high efficiency) measures the load by spinning it with a calibrated input impulse and measuring the rotation of the basket, less rotation means more clothes means more water. It's helpful to load the clothes around the edge to get the right amount of water. But that doesn't illuminate how cycle duration is determined.