The techniques aren't that new; all that is new is having the gigabytes upon gigabytes of RAM to run them, not too mention CPU power, and scads of data.

I knew what a neural network was, and understood it as part of AI, when Wham! was in the Top 40 charts.

The hate isn't for the "new" techniques, I think; just for the posers who claim to be AI experts because they know how to use some Python library or whatnot.

You don't have AI creds if you have no background in the symbolic stuff.

We'll have to disagree. You can be perfectly well credentialled without having years of studying techniques that aren't very successful. It is really rewriting history to pretend that old style NN and backpropagation is the same as modern systems -- implementation techniques matter.