The topic is really interesting, and this book had a big impact in my understanding of the world, yet I found it pretty annoying to read. The grudge born by J. Pearl against the statistics community who rejected his ideas is way too present in the book IMHO. He's almost like “I was right all along you fuckers, who's the boss now!” on every single page, and I feel it's really disserving his ideas.
That was what put me off about that book too. I was really excited to learn about his math, but the continuous hard sell combined with attacking traditional statistical methods (which still have a lot of use) was pretty off putting. I will probably pick it back up, but it was not a great way to hook readers or bring them around to your way of thinking.
I think "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems" is a better starting point for Pearl. Not much easier but more familiar ground if you're coming from today's ML mindset.
As an aside, once while reading through Wasserman's "All of Statistics", he somehow hypnotized me into seeing the title of Ch.16 as "Casual Inference", so anyone who knows me knows that I can't help making a dad-joke about casual inference when the topic comes up.