Sure! My position is definitely not "ML is useless"! I've written plenty of ML and particularly think the current focus on DL is missing a lot of opportunities for augmented human intelligence (and risk mitigation of systematized bias) with explainable models.
As for showing stakeholders they're keeping up with trends: yeah I'd definitely categorize that as regrettable :-)
Well, one reason to "keep up with trends" is because if your direct competitor does use ML to unveil some market/product/business opportunity or optimization, and you (executive/CIO/CEO) weren't at the least looking into the technology, heads are going to roll.
As for showing stakeholders they're keeping up with trends: yeah I'd definitely categorize that as regrettable :-)