By funeral I mean, academia completely killed the applicability of this rich branch of engineering and left it as "exercise to the reader". Take MPC control, it originated from the industry and academia did not care for very long time until it has been realized that you can play around with optimization problems and now being put forth as the one of the jewels that rigorous mathematical gave birth to.

Industry, exceptions notwithstanding, pretty much got used to ignoring the the theoretical advances. Hence control theory became this testeless pages long article sillyness where you get 9 pages of integral inequalities to tune 2 parameters and call it adaptive control success.

I suppose they are referring to black box methods like those based on deep learning.