Oh, I was not defending neural networks. This was the cynical sales pitch for the case where you don't want to employ mathematicians or computer scientists, but just throw code and computational resources at the problem.
But isn't that an important part of the value of neural networks? Mathematicians are expensive so we'd like a computer to make a model for us, just like drivers are expensive so we want self-driving cars.
The issue with that is NN fail in some really interesting ways so you still need a lot of effort to get a robust solution. Remember, after some serious investments by many organizations self driving cars are still in development. At the same time a few people have demonstrated a basic system that seems close without nearly that much investment. Unfortunately, the difference between a demo and working solution can be several orders of magnitude.