See Breiman's classic "Two Cultures" paper that this post's title is referencing: https://projecteuclid.org/journals/statistical-science/volum...
Edit: corrected my sentence, but see 0xdde reply for better info.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/pattern...
Giving a cursory look into Bishop's book I see that I am wrong, as there's deep root in Bayesian Inference as well.
On another note, I find it very interesting that there's not a bigger emphasis on using the correct distributions in ML models, as the methods are much more concerned in optimizing objective functions.
In particular, variational inference is a family of techniques that makes these kinds of problems computationally tractable. It shows up everywhere from variational autoencoders, to time-series state-space modeling, to reinforcement learning.
If you want to learn more, I recommend reading Murphy's textbooks on ML: https://probml.github.io/pml-book/book2.html