There is a lot of machine learning snake oil out there, even in the most prestigious journals. The issue is that most people wouldn't know about it until they actually try to reproduce those results (if they can at all in the first place).
It is a huge issue now that machine learning has made its way into every field of research, while almost nobody has adequate training to even gauge what is and isn't questionable. Even the grad students who end up doing all the "hard work" usually don't have much of an idea of what exactly they hacked together and how to access its validity.
The crazy thing is that, despite all of this, you can still get ahead if you have know just slightly more buzzwords than others and have a paper or two (don't have to be first author) to show for. At the end of the day, I suppose all of this is nothing new (machine learning practitioners are the new SEO consultants?), and I'm just venting my frustration for not being able to accept this is how things work.