People that think ML/AI isn't statistics typically haven't studied statistics, or have a marketing agenda. I can tolerate the latter as a fact of life. But the former ... there is often a disturbing lack of statistical understanding in "ML/AI" practitioners at the ground level, even though the vast majority of their tooling is built on basic multivariate statistics. It's rather inevitable give the sudden sex-appeal of the field, but will lead to an 'AI winter' as those folks over promise and under-deliver. Computational statistics, statistical learning, machine learning, pick your term certainly continues to progress as computational horsepower improves. But as another commenter noted, physicists/chemists still self-identify with quantum mechanics even though the computational methods/approximations for molecular dynamics continue to rapidly improve.