[albertzeyer]

It is possible to use neural networks and still be on a quite different path than the mainstream.

Of course, there are a group of people defending the symbolic computation, e.g. see Gary Marcus, and always pushing back on connectionism (neural networks).

But this is somewhat a spectrum, or also rather sloppy terminology. Once you go away from symbolic computation, many things can be interpret as neural network. And there is also all the computational neuroscience, which also work with some variants of neural networks.

And there is the human brain, which demonstrates, that a neural network is capable of doing AGI. So why would you not want a neural network? But that does not say that you can do many things very different from mainstream.