It’s like asking why are gym memberships and diet advice more marketed than eating less and free body weight exercises you can do anywhere. There is a market for solutions and good news, whereas there isn’t one for bad news, even if it’s free.

In a goldrush, sell shovels.

But the noble thing to do is to stop luring people into these wealth-gap increasing casinos.

Yes but it's not really about the number crunching itself (NN's or something else), but more about modelling the "wider world" ("macro") outside the company that could drive its business. Like if you wanted to project an oil company's cash flows into the future, you'd do a lot of analysis and number crunching on things like IEA projections, known oil reserves, risk scenario analysis and the like.