I'm a big NN proponent as well, and I generally agree, but as so many things can go wrong training I prefer to have a baseline (such as SVD in this case) first to make sure the NN is actually doing what you want.

Now, you actually do have to understand how to apply the NN correctly for this problem- each user has a embedding, which is a trainable parameter, and you train it on pairs that have interacted. I don't think your average PyTorch MNIST tutorial will teach this.