I think you object to the lack of "mathematical beauty", but my point is "who cares?". Not sure why should reality conform to some mental model we find "appealing" for whatever reason. Deep Learning is similar to experimental physics.
Explainable AI is a emerging field, I hear about this necessity specially in NLP and Law. We expect to understand how some decision was reached, and we'll never accept some computer-generated decision if it wasn't explained how each logical step was done. And just giving millions of weights of each neuron won't give us that, because we won't be able to reach the same decision with just those parameters.
We know that IA is a bunch of probabilities, weights and relations in n-dimensions. Our rational brain can know that too, but can't feel it.
Example of this would be here: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Active-Explainable-Clas...
Until they don't. Which may happen easily if you deploy a model for the first time.
My personal view is that (at this moment) ML is mostly correlation detection and pattern recognition, but has little to do with intelligence.