I fully agree with your perspective, and I think there's a lot of cargo-culting in that area that explains your observations. Sure, if you're a FAANG collecting

I fully agree with your perspective, and I think there's a lot of cargo-culting in that area that explains your observations. Sure, if you're a FAANG collecting massive amounts of data comes almost for free, and it makes sense to find a way to properly utilize that data. But for many startups collecting that amount of data doesn't make sense (either because they don't have a lot of users yet or because their domain isn't high-freq digital activity or both), and in those cases it can be more worthwhile figuring out what to do with the little data they have than shoe-horning their way into Big Data (TM). There's much more money to be had convincing startups to use big data infrastructure and train huge nets on GPU clusters etc. than convincing them to iterate on small ad-hoc models developed in-house. Not saying that big data or models are necessarily wrong for small startups, just that they don't have to be the default.