"Who cares about the ontology when we can recreate? It's like saying airplanes don't properly explain flight because they don't replicate how birds do it. Who cares?"

Well, I do. Being able to understand something from first principle is very different than being able to model it and gain an approximation of it.

One might point out that this debate crops up in a different form in developer circles, but reframed as "Learn assembly & cs theory vs. use IDE & ignore assembly and theory".