Yeah, everyone's machine learning Ph.D.s are useless now because you spent an afternoon reading a 100 page PDF.

You would be surprised. Deep learning usurped a ton of knowledge about SVMs and such, and then TensorFlow/Keras made it easy to write and deploy good models with little knowledge.

Clearly its more complex than that, but this is true for a good number of use cases.

What do you mean by that?

he/she means that knowing something isn't valuable anymore. maybe that's true but I prefer this to guilds and gatekeepers.

also that's not a cost but an externality.

externalities are inherently costs/benefits, the only thing that's different is who is affected.