I don't disagree per se but I think you're over-selling physicists' capabilities (former academic physicist here, PhD and all) and also using the latest hype-based machine learning cult in the Bay Area as a stand-in for all ML.

Mathematical modeling is essential to well-done data science. I won't let my team (I manage some machine learning engineers and data scientists) get away with what I call "toy modeling", that is parameter tuning and basic model implementation, and claim they're "doing data science." They need to provide a fairly rigorous analysis and basic mathematical models to justify their choices for particular algorithms or reaching for the "I give up" tool of so-called deep-learning. And the second my bosses tell me to just let them "do ML" is the second I resign. I won't be part of diluting the quality of my team's work