[mkrump]

Completely agree. Everything that is supposedly not addressed in Kaggle actually is, aside from productionizing and monitoring your model in production. Sure it's a simplified less open ended version of what you'll encounter in the real world, but that doesn't mean that many of the core concepts don't translate. It's kind of like saying that you shouldn't do your calculus practice problems, because math in the real world is never so straightforward.

I think the most legitimate knock against Kaggle is that in many business settings there probably isn't much value in improving that extra .00001 (but obviously there are exceptions).

Anyway, I think that that even someone very experienced in machine learning would learn something doing a Kaggle competition, especially if the competition is in an area outside their core expertise.